Every Tom Cruise Movie of the 2020s, Ranked
Jeremy has more than 2800 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.
Sign in to your Collider account
Well, Tom Cruise sure is an actor. More specifically, he’s a movie star, and there is a certain mythology or legend around him that suggests he’s one of the last traditional movie stars, but that might be a bit much. He is still great, there are still other legendary actors, and there is a bit of hyperbole around the capacity of Cruise’s name to sell tickets. If you look at his 2020s roles to date, one movie of the bunch was a massive hit (a sequel to Top Gun that did surprisingly well), but his other three movies haven’t done all that amazingly. Maybe they would’ve been considered modest successes had they been modestly budgeted, but the one that flopped the hardest cost a lot, and then the other two, while doing a little better, cost more to an enormous extent.
There’s a sequel to Days of Thunder apparently coming out later in the decade, so if that does well, maybe it and the Top Gun sequel will be testaments to how nostalgic people are for the Tom Cruise movies of old, or just older films generally. For now, though, there are four 2020s movies Cruise has starred in, and he has very much retained being a “movie star” throughout the decade in the sense that he’s undeniably the one with the lead role in all four of those movies. They're ranked below, starting with one that was a bit of a misfire (but not nearly as bad as some of Cruise’s earlier movies; the ones that really represent low points in his filmography), and ending with the ones that might well be modern classics, or pretty close to it, at least.
4 'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' (2025)
Tom Cruise does still throw himself into the eighth movie in the Mission: Impossible series, The Final Reckoning, but if it does indeed end up being the final Mission: Impossible, it’s a pretty disappointing finale, in a lot of ways. The problem comes down to there not being enough action and excitement, which is a strange thing to say about this series, because it’s never been lacking the basics of what you want out of the action and thriller genres. The first movie was a bit more of a thriller, but works well as one, so if there’s a technical “lack” of action there, it doesn’t make the movie itself lacking. As for the second movie, that one’s a mess, but at least it has a great deal of very theatrical and over-the-top action.
You really feel the fact that this movie’s 170 minutes long pretty much the entire time (the last thing you want to be aware of during an epic-length action movie is how long it’s all taking).
The fact that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was inferior to that second movie was deeply upsetting. There are two pretty great sequences here, and some smaller bursts of action that definitely aren’t bad, yet there just had to be more. There needed to be more of an effort here, and failing that, they should’ve just hacked 30 to 40 minutes off the runtime, because you really feel the fact that this movie’s 170 minutes long pretty much the entire time (the last thing you want to be aware of during an epic-length action movie is how long it’s all taking). There was a backpedaling on ideas and threads left hanging after the end of the seventh movie, and The Final Reckoning feels hastily reassembled and almost unfinished, honestly. Even with some impressive stunts and fight sequences, it’s distressing how much of this doesn’t work, and also saddening how it harms the Mission: Impossible series and its legacy as a whole.
3 'Digger' (2026)
Whether it’s a good movie or not (people are divided, to say the least), one thing is for certain: it’s nice to see Tom Cruise do something weird and not action or franchise-related again, in tackling Digger. It’s not like all his 21st-century movies have been blockbusters, but quite a few have, with Digger having him do something a bit more dramatic and grounded in some regards, but also arthouse in other ways. It’s like it’s 1999 again, and Cruise is pushing himself in strange, not-exactly-mass-appeal, but also very well-respected movies like Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut. Okay, not a perfect comparison, because Digger is not as good as those movies, and it’s also trying to be a bit weirder, which is saying quite a lot. It’s something of a drama and an unintentionally not-very-funny comedy at the same time, which makes it a baffling watch at first, and then it’s even more head-spinning when it reveals what kind of movie it really is.
Because yes, saying that this is more than a dramedy, and going into any other genres it might belong to? Definitely spoiler territory, and the movie is still recent enough, at the time of writing, that it feels right to keep things under wraps. What Digger does is clever, but you really have to give it your time and attention, and that’s the hard part, since parts of this film are pretty tedious and difficult to get through. Going big and getting challenging, though, is the kind of thing that should be celebrated, even if done imperfectly, and there are things that happen toward the end of Digger that are hard to stop thinking about, once you’ve experienced the whole thing. Cruise goes big and gives a strong performance in the ways you'd expect, but then because Digger isn't quite what you'd expect, he gets to push a little further and do some other things as the central actor, too. He’s great here, and Digger, if not great itself, is also greatly interesting, and that’s something.
2 'Top Gun: Maverick' (2022)
And then on the other end of things from Digger is Top Gun: Maverick, which was that previously-mentioned Tom Cruise movie that was a massive hit, being one of the earliest blockbusters of the post-COVID era, or maybe 2022 was still kind of COVID? The first few years of the decade are a blur, in all honesty. But yeah, Top Gun: Maverick was one of those definitive “Oh, guess the movies are back” kind of movies. Spider-Man: No Way Home was massive the year before, but you could feel the restrictions that movie was made under, while Top Gun: Maverick was filmed right before the whole lockdown era, but was delayed to wait for more cinemas to reopen. It was the right call, because Top Gun: Maverick did really benefit from being seen on the biggest screen possible, with the spectacle being the main reason to watch it, more so than the story… which was fine.
Like, it was a fine and serviceable story, and an improvement on whatever narrative was or wasn’t there in the first movie, because Top Gun (1986) was pretty much just vibes only. Top Gun: Maverick established stakes better, it felt paced like an actual movie, and there were some interesting things it did with returning and new characters alike. It played things safe, but safe worked out well, like a genuinely great pop song pretty much everyone likes, and maybe almost as many people sort of take for granted. Top Gun: Maverick is an easy film to enjoy, but can’t have been an easy one to make (true crowd-pleasers are honestly fairly rare), and so not putting it in the #1 spot here might seem like a bit of a hot take.
1 'Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning' (2023)
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning was a risk, and The Final Reckoning showed what kind of movie Dead Reckoning might’ve been had it not been super well-handled, but it was, thankfully, a largely great action blockbuster, and genuinely fun, which is an emotion you don’t feel all that much watching Cruise’s other Mission: Impossible movie of the decade. As for the story, it’s the usual stuff, with Ethan Hunt being the only person who can save the world, admittedly having a little help from his friends, but not too much. Tom Cruise is Hunt, of course, and he gets to basically be a superhero, defying death and overcoming monumental odds. And Cruise does make it believable, to some extent, because he’s got this commitment to the role here, and there’s also good writing (for an action movie) and filmmaking here to have his back, and that’s all you need.
Also, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning is incredibly long, clocking in at only about a quarter of an hour shy of three hours, but after a slightly dialogue-heavy first couple of scenes, much of the film manages to be an absolute rush of action sequences, with pretty much each one being bigger and more exciting than the last. It works as a thriller, it’s got more than enough action, and there’s also a real variety of locations throughout, giving it the feel of an adventure movie in some ways (more so than the weirdly claustrophobic, small-scale, and borderline-cheap-looking The Final Reckoning). The best Mission: Impossible movie did come out in the 2010s, since Fallout is kind of unbeatable, but if you're trying to crown one as the second-best, then Dead Reckoning is honestly a contender, alongside the original, film #4 (Ghost Protocol), and film #5 (Rogue Nation).
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.