Tom Cruise's Sci-Fi Movies, Ranked

We’re going to spell retired connected a limb present with a brainsick blistery take. Tom Cruise has made a batch of bully movies. We know! Shocking and controversial, but from Top Gun and Rain Man, to Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, A Few Good Men, The Color of Money, Jerry Maguire, and galore many more, we deliberation it’s warranted.

Cruise turns 62 today, which seems astir arsenic brainsick arsenic the supra statement. He surely doesn’t look similar a adjacent elder citizen, but possibly that’s due to the fact that he’s dabbled successful truthful overmuch subject fiction. Throughout his career, Cruise has not lone made plentifulness of accepted blockbusters and Oscar fare, but tons of precocious conception sci-fi too, galore of which are fantastic, others of which are not.

Below, we’ve got our ranking of Cruise’s sci-fi/fantasy films, with a fewer surprises on the way.

8. The Mummy (2017)

Ooo boy. We could constitute encyclopedias astir everything that went incorrect with The Mummy and have travel adjacent already. But 1 speedy illustration is that Cruise’s instrumentality connected the Universal Monsters franchise was to marque the movie astir himself and not the titular character. A acheronian universe, indeed.

7. Legend (1985)

Honestly, The Mummy is the lone atrocious Tom Cruise sci-fi movie. Legend is really beauteous good, conscionable possibly a small little truthful than the films supra it. Ridley Scott directs the sweeping phantasy champion known for Tim Curry’s unforgettable character, Darkness.

6. Vanilla Sky (2001)

Cameron Crowe’s remake of the Spanish movie Open Your Eyes is simply a creepy, weird, hugely underrated communicative of a antheral who experiences unthinkable loss, and tries to maltreatment and utilize subject and medicine for his ain idiosyncratic gain. Not an casual movie to ticker oregon digest, but a memorable 1 nevertheless. One of those movies lone Tom Cruise could do.

5. Oblivion (2013)

I honestly benignant of emotion Oblivion. Sure, it’s conscionable a remix of each sci-fi idea made fashionable successful the 1980s and 1990s, but it’s sprawling, it’s beautiful, and doesn’t truly get the attraction it deserves.

4. Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Cruise stars alongside Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst successful this aboriginal adaptation of the Anne Rice novel, which has seen immoderate caller beingness of precocious due to the AMC show. This version, written by Rice herself, is much faithful to the archetypal substance than that show, but nary little gothic and engaging.

3. War of the Worlds (2005)

Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg teamed up for this adaptation of the H.G. Wells caller astir a begetter protecting his children during an alien invasion. It’s large and bold successful each the ways 1 would expect from Spielberg, but possibly conscionable falls a spot abbreviated due to the fact that of the director’s different films, and the pair’s erstwhile collaboration.

2. Minority Report (2002)

If Minority Report didn’t exist, War of the Worlds would beryllium conscionable a tad much special. But it does beryllium and it’s great. It’s Cruise and Spielberg unneurotic astatine past giving america a phenomenal, breathtaking sci-fi escapade astir a antheral who stops crimes earlier they happen, and past finds himself the entity of a chase. We wrote a ton much astir it here.

1.5 Trapped successful the Closet

Though he’s not explicitly in, oregon a portion of, this iconic occurrence of South Park, we thought it was astatine slightest worthy mentioning earlier getting to fig one...

1. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Edge of Tomorrow isn’t conscionable Tom Cruise’s champion sci-fi movie, it whitethorn beryllium 1 of his champion movies, period. Director Doug Liman, from a publication co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, creates an electric, intense, roller coaster thrust of clip question and alien invasion. Cruise shines on with co-star Emily Blunt and we’re inactive holding retired anticipation that a sequel happens.

Honorable Mention: The Mission Impossible Movie

The Mission: Impossible movies aren’t sci-fi of course, but they are what we astatine io9 likes to telephone “spy-fi.” It’s a precise circumstantial cross-section of believable enactment with fictionalized exertion that we emotion and screen connected the tract but, for purposes of this list, person chosen to ignore. But the MI movies are large and, well...6-1-4-3-5-7-2.

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