# Tom Cruise: Fighter Pilot, Sports Agent, Vampire, Hitman
> Four Oscar nominations, no competitive win, and one honorary statue: Tom Cruise seen through 16 rankings, from aviation films to courtroom drama.
*By YPB Team · Published August 26, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/tom-cruise-ranked-many-ways*
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Tom Cruise at the 53rd Saturn Awards, Los Angeles, March 2026. Photo: Luis Ochea, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Tom Cruise has been nominated for an Academy Award four times and has never won one. On 16 November 2025 the Academy gave him an Honorary Award anyway, at the Governors Awards, for a body of work that runs from a Vietnam veteran in a wheelchair to a man hanging off the side of the world's tallest building.1
That body of work is also the reason his name shows up in places nobody planned for it. He is on aviation lists, courtroom lists, party-movie lists and other actors' filmographies. On 2 October 2026 he opens in *Digger*, an Alejandro G. Iñárritu comedy billed as "a comedy of catastrophic proportions", which is a sentence nobody would have written about him in 1986.2
Sixteen rankings on YouPickBest have Tom Cruise in them. Here is where they put him.
> Cruise's films keep surfacing on lists that are not about Tom Cruise: a Paul Newman ranking, a Fourth of July ranking, a party-movie ranking.
## Ghost Protocol vs Rain Man: the climb or the Oscar winner
Start with the list that is actually about him. Eighteen Cruise films sit in one bracket, and the only thing linking them is the man in the credits.
*Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol* is there because of ninety seconds of it. Cruise climbed the outside of the Burj Khalifa himself for the 2011 film, moving between the 123rd and 130th floors of a 2,722-foot tower rather than handing the sequence to a stuntman.3
*Rain Man* is there for the opposite reason. It won Best Picture, Dustin Hoffman won Best Actor, and Cruise carries the whole second half as the brother nobody roots for.
A bracket that can hold both of those is not really asking which film is best. It is asking which Tom Cruise you mean.
Eighteen of his own films in one bracket, and no obvious winner among them. Play it →
## Magnolia and Risky Business: the two ends of the range
The second Cruise ranking drops the stunts and asks about the acting. Different question, different shortlist.
*Magnolia* is the outlier of his career: Paul Thomas Anderson cast him as Frank T.J. Mackey, a screaming seduction guru, and the Academy nominated him for Best Supporting Actor. It is the closest he has come to playing a man with no self-control.
*Risky Business* is the other end. A suburban teenager turns the family house into a brothel while his parents are away, and the film made Cruise a star at 21.
Sixteen performances, sorted on craft rather than altitude, and the two that bookend the list are a 1983 teen comedy and a 1999 art film.
The same career, judged on acting rather than altitude. Play it →
## Top Gun vs Die Hard: the 1980s action shelf
*Top Gun* opened on 16 May 1986 and has taken $360.5 million worldwide, and it is the film that made Cruise a fixture of the decade.4
The competition in this ranking is brutal. *Die Hard*, *The Terminator*, *RoboCop*, *Predator*, *Aliens*, *Raiders of the Lost Ark*: films that invented the shapes other action films still copy.
*Top Gun* invented something narrower. It turned a fighter-weapons school into a brand, and it works as an advertisement in a way nothing else on the shelf attempts.
Top Gun against the decade that also produced Die Hard. Play it →
## Two of eleven airplane films are his
Eleven films make up this ranking. Cruise supplies two.
Most of the others treat a plane as a problem to survive: *Airplane!*, *Air Force One*, *Sully*, *United 93*, *Snakes on a Plane*.
*Top Gun* and *Top Gun: Maverick* are the only entries where the plane is the point rather than the emergency.
Both are built around what a fighter jet looks like from inside the cockpit, which is why an aviation ranking treats them as a category of their own.
A category he supplies two of the eleven entries to. Play it →
## Terminator 2, Fury Road, and the sequel that quadrupled its original
Sequels are where Cruise's numbers get strange. *Top Gun: Maverick* arrived 36 years after *Top Gun* and took $1,503,260,455 worldwide on a $177 million budget, more than four times what the original managed.5
*Mission: Impossible – Fallout* is the other Cruise entry here, and the franchise's high-water mark at $824,171,374 against a $178 million budget.6
Then the counter-evidence. The 2025 finale, *The Final Reckoning*, cost $350 million and took $598,767,057, so the cheaper film is still the bigger one.7
Three names dominate this ranking without any help from Cruise: *Terminator 2: Judgment Day*, *Mad Max: Fury Road* and *The Dark Knight*. Each one changed what its franchise was allowed to be. *Maverick* changed what a 36-year gap was allowed to be.
Two Cruise sequels in a field led by Terminator 2. Play it →
## Ethan Hunt in a bracket built for James Bond
Three of the twelve entries in this spy ranking are Bond films: *Goldfinger*, *Casino Royale*, *Skyfall*. The category was defined by a rival series before Ethan Hunt existed.
*Mission: Impossible – Fallout* is the Cruise entry, and it argues a different case. Bond films sell an attitude; the *Mission: Impossible* films sell the claim that the man on screen really did that.
Four quieter entries carry better reviews than either: *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*, *Three Days of the Condor*, *North by Northwest*, *Munich*. Spy stories where nobody hangs off anything.
Ethan Hunt in a bracket built around James Bond. Play it →
## The Godfather, Psycho, and three Tom Cruise films
Paramount has been making films for more than a century, and this ranking of its twenty greatest includes *The Godfather*, *The Godfather Part II*, *Chinatown*, *Psycho* and *Sunset Boulevard*.
Three of the twenty are Cruise films: *Top Gun*, *Top Gun: Maverick* and *Mission: Impossible – Fallout*. No other performer has that many.
That is what a four-decade relationship with one studio looks like on a list. It also explains why *Top Gun: Maverick* is treated as a corporate event rather than a sequel: Paramount had nothing else of that size in 2022.
Three of the studio's twenty are his, and The Godfather is also here. Play it →
## Jerry Maguire vs Rocky: a sports film with almost no sport
*Jerry Maguire* is a sports movie in which nobody plays a full game. Cruise is an agent who loses his job, keeps one client and spends the film making phone calls.
Everything else on this list has a match in it. *Rocky*, *Raging Bull*, *Hoosiers*, *Field of Dreams*, *Million Dollar Baby*, *Whiplash* if you count a drum kit as a stadium.
The Academy nominated Cruise for Best Actor, and gave Cuba Gooding Jr. the Best Supporting Actor award for the "show me the money" scene that the film is remembered by.
The category is really about what a sports movie is for. If it is about winning, *Rocky* owns the shelf. If it is about the person on the sideline, *Jerry Maguire* has no competition here at all.
A sports movie with no sport in it, up against Rocky. Play it →
## A Few Good Men next to 12 Angry Men
Cruise's courtroom entry is from 1992, on a ranking of legal dramas whose oldest films date to 1957.
*A Few Good Men* is the Aaron Sorkin script where Jack Nicholson delivers "you can't handle the truth" and Cruise spends two hours being outmatched by him on purpose.
*12 Angry Men*, *To Kill a Mockingbird*, *Judgment at Nuremberg* and *Witness for the Prosecution* are the pillars of the genre, and none of them needed a movie star.
The lawyer role, measured against 12 Angry Men. Play it →
## Collateral: grey hair, a grey suit, and the 2000s thriller shelf
*Collateral* is the film where Cruise stops being likeable. He plays Vincent, a contract killer with silver hair who takes a Los Angeles cab driver hostage for one night, and the performance works because the audience keeps waiting for him to turn charming.
The ranking around it is the prestige end of the decade: *No Country for Old Men*, *The Departed*, *Zodiac*, *Memento*, *Oldboy*, *Memories of Murder*, *Mystic River*.
Jamie Foxx was nominated for Best Supporting Actor as the cab driver. Cruise was not nominated for anything.
That gap is the interesting part. In the film's own year, the star playing against type was the second story.
Grey hair, a grey suit, and a decade of better-reviewed thrillers. Play it →
## Heat vs Collateral: the one time Cruise plays the villain
This ranking is somebody else's career. Michael Mann directed twelve features, and *Collateral* is one of them.
*Heat* is the one everyone names first, for the Al Pacino and Robert De Niro coffee-shop scene and the downtown shootout that action directors still study.
*Collateral* earns its place on the list partly because of the casting. Mann had Vincent written as a professional with no interior life, and hiring the most watched face in American cinema to play him is the reason the film unsettles people.
*The Insider*, *The Last of the Mohicans*, *Manhunter*, *Thief* and *Ali* fill out the twelve, so Cruise is a guest here rather than the subject.
Somebody else's filmography, and Heat is in it. Play it →
## Edge of Tomorrow took $381 million and is still called underrated
*Edge of Tomorrow* is the Cruise film his fans defend hardest. A 2014 alien-invasion story built on a time loop, it took $381,055,527 worldwide against a $178 million budget, but domestic cinemas contributed only $100.2 million of that.8
Domestic indifference is why it reads as a cult film rather than a hit. Cruise spends the first half being killed repeatedly and playing a coward, which is not what a summer audience had been sold.
The company it keeps in this sci-fi ranking is heavy: *Inception*, *Interstellar*, *Blade Runner 2049*, *Arrival*, *Ex Machina*, *Her*, *Mad Max: Fury Road*. Films that get written about rather than defended.
The Cruise film people keep saying deserved better. Play it →
## Born on the Fourth of July vs Independence Day
Cruise appears twice on this Fourth of July ranking, from opposite directions.
*Top Gun* is the flag-waving one. *Born on the Fourth of July* is Oliver Stone's film about Ron Kovic, a Marine paralyzed in Vietnam who came home and campaigned against the war, and it won Stone the Oscar for Best Director.
Around them sit *Independence Day*, *Saving Private Ryan*, *Apollo 13*, *Glory*, *Hidden Figures* and *1776*. A holiday with room for an alien invasion and a veteran in a wheelchair.
He is on this list twice, from opposite ends of patriotism. Play it →
## Risky Business, Animal House, and the party that started a career
Two Cruise films are on this ranking of party movies, and they could not be further apart.
*Risky Business* supplies the party a teenager throws when his parents leave town, plus the sock-slide to Bob Seger that every trailer has quoted since 1983.
*Eyes Wide Shut* supplies the other kind: Stanley Kubrick's masked gathering, filmed on a closed set, in a film Kubrick died before seeing released.
*Animal House*, *The Hangover*, *Superbad* and *Dazed and Confused* are what this list is normally about, which makes the Kubrick entry the strangest name in it.
Animal House, The Hangover, and the two strangest parties in his filmography. Play it →
## The Color of Money: Paul Newman's Oscar, and the kid with the cue
Paul Newman was nominated six times before he won anything. He finally took Best Actor on 30 March 1987 for *The Color of Money*, reprising Fast Eddie Felson 25 years after *The Hustler*.9
The young pool hustler he mentors and resents in that film is Tom Cruise, aged 24, one year after *Top Gun*.
So Cruise appears inside a ranking of Newman's twenty best films, alongside *Cool Hand Luke*, *Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid* and *The Hustler*, as the co-star in the one that finally got Newman his statue.
There is a symmetry here that only became visible in 2025. Newman spent three decades being nominated and losing, then won for a film about an old pro teaching a cocky kid. Cruise was first nominated in 1990, and 35 years later the Academy handed him an honorary Oscar instead.
The film where the older man finally won his Oscar. Play it →
## Tom Cruise vs Nicolas Cage: the only list where he plays himself
Fifteen rankings put a Cruise film on a shelf. This one puts Cruise on it, as a name in a list of the most overrated actors in Hollywood, next to Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie.
The case for including him is that he plays a competence fantasy over and over and rarely disappears into anyone. The case against is that he keeps taking the parts nobody wanted him in: the guru, the hitman, the paralyzed veteran.
The awards record cuts both ways too. In 2021 he returned all three of his Golden Globes, won for *Born on the Fourth of July*, *Jerry Maguire* and *Magnolia*, joining the protest over the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's lack of Black members.10 In March 2026 he won Best Actor at the Saturn Awards for *The Final Reckoning*, the most expensive film the series has made.11
An overrated-actor list is the one place a movie star cannot send a film in his place.
The one list where he is himself, not a role. Play it →
## Sixteen shelves, one filmography
A career this wide stops being one thing you can rank. Cruise is a Paramount asset, a Michael Mann guest, Paul Newman's co-star, an aviation brand and a name on an overrated list, and no single ranking holds more than a slice of that.
Every one of those sixteen shelves gets sorted by [putting two films in front of you at once](/articles/what-is-pairwise-comparison), which is how a category ends up arguing with itself instead of handing over a top ten.
The director who handed him that honorary statue, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, has him in front of a camera again this autumn.12 Whichever shelf *Digger* lands on, it will not be one of the sixteen above.
Pick the shelf you actually care about, and go argue with it.
## More rankings, more angles
- [Christopher Nolan: $6,000 Debut, $250M Odyssey, 16 Lists](/articles/christopher-nolan-ranked-many-ways) — the director behind Inception, Cruise's rival in the 2010s sci-fi ranking
- [How Many Ways Can You Rank Matt Damon?](/articles/how-many-ways-to-rank-matt-damon) — the name directly above Cruise on the overrated-actors list
- [How Many Ways Can You Rank Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson?](/articles/how-many-ways-to-rank-dwayne-johnson) — the other American action star who produces his own vehicles
Sources
PBS NewsHour — Tom Cruise's Honorary Academy Award at the Governors Awards, and his four previous nominations: pbs.org (checked 2026-08-26)
Variety — Digger, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, dated for 2 October 2026: variety.com (checked 2026-08-26)
ScreenRant — how the Burj Khalifa climb in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was shot, and the heights involved: screenrant.com (checked 2026-08-26)
Box Office Mojo — Top Gun (1986) release date and worldwide gross: boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-08-26)
Box Office Mojo — Top Gun: Maverick worldwide gross and production budget: boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-08-26)
Box Office Mojo — Mission: Impossible – Fallout worldwide gross and production budget: boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-08-26)
Box Office Mojo — Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning worldwide gross and production budget: boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-08-26)
Box Office Mojo — Edge of Tomorrow worldwide gross, domestic gross and budget: boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-08-26)
D23 — Paul Newman's Best Actor win for The Color of Money on 30 March 1987, after six previous nominations: d23.com (checked 2026-08-26)
Deadline — Cruise returning his three Golden Globe trophies in 2021 and the films they were won for: deadline.com (checked 2026-08-26)
Fangoria — 53rd Saturn Awards results, including Best Actor for Tom Cruise and Best Action/Adventure Film for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning: fangoria.com (checked 2026-08-26)
IndieWire — Alejandro G. Iñárritu presenting Cruise's Honorary Award at the 2025 Governors Awards: indiewire.com (checked 2026-08-26)
