Tom Cruise Movies Are Better (And More Lucrative) When He Runs More

Coming soon: Tom Cruise is Marathon Man...

Tom Cruise Tidal Wave Of Money
Paramount Pictures

If you want to make lots of money and gain more critical acclaim when Tom Cruise is on your castlist, you better make sure he's running. This is not because Cruise is particularly good at running (though, of course, he is) or because films about running are fundamentally better, it's because it's scientifically proven (sort of) that there's a direct correlation between how much the Mission Impossible star runs and the success of his movies.

With Mission: Impossible - Fallout hitting cinemas this weekend, Rotten Tomatoes has crunched the numbers to work out exactly how much running Cruise has done over his career and what impact it's had on the box office. And the bad news for him - assuming he wants an easier life, anyway - is that he's not going to be able to hang up his running shoes just yet. Or ever, if studio bosses get wind of this.

The data compiled proves that "movies featuring Cruise running more than 1,000 feet have a higher Tomatometer average (a huge 71 percent) than the movies in which he runs less than that, or not at all – and the same movies make more money at the box office, with an average inflated international gross of $538 million."

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The signs indicate that Cruise is running more as he gets older, and Fallout definitely slots into that since he spends a significant amount of the money running away from things and after things and on top of things. Whether he outdoes his previous record of 3212 feet (in Mission: Impossible III) remains unclear at this stage, but it must certainly be close, which might indicate why everyone loves Fallout so much. And why it's currently making more money than any of the other movies at this stage in their releases.

RT released the top movies in Cruise's cinematic sprint-a-thon, and it makes for intriguing reading. All of the data is based on the simple calculation taking ever running scene in seconds against the assumption that Cruise averages a six-minute mile:

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Mission: Impossible III – 3,212 feet

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol – 3,066 feet

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War of the Worlds – 1,752 feet

Minority Report – 1,562 feet

The Firm – 1,241 feet

Edge of Tomorrow – 1,065 feet

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back – 1,051 feet

The Mummy – 1,022 feet

Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation – 1,007 feet

Vanilla Sky – 832 feet

Obviously, The Mummy is an anomaly in there, since it sucked and he still ran a lot, but other than that, it does check out. So expect Mission: Impossible 7 to just be him running laps of a stadium wearing different masks. Possibly.

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