Tom Cruise once invited me to a Mission: Impossible set.

It was Mission: Impossible III, directed by J.J. Abrams. I had to drive a good 45 minutes into the California desert to get there. But when I arrived, there was nothing desert about it. There were crashed cars everywhere. A freeway overpass split in half by a controlled detonation. A helicopter hovering on standby.

Tom’s scene called for him to run full-speed through the debris, leap over the hood of a scorched-out car, and sprint away from a rising helicopter skimming a wrecked freeway set.

In the middle of the take, as blades chopped overhead and dust flew, Tom Cruise turned, locked eyes with me, grinned and shouted:

“Scott, are you having fun yet?”

I’ll never forget it. Because I knew he was.

Tom Cruise is the last action hero.

In a world of pixels, he bets his body.

In Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025), Cruise walks the wing of a biplane mid-flight, upside down, no visible harness. He dives into a submarine in a 125-pound diving suit. He leads a full-speed sled chase through the Arctic. He throws fists on Paris rooftops with the Eiffel Tower in the background.

It follows what he did just one movie earlier: base-jumped off a cliff on a motorcycle. Held his breath underwater for six minutes. Skydived from 25,000 feet. Clung to a moving train. Hung off the side of an Airbus as it took off.

He’s not just starring in these. He’s building them.

Cruise produces these movies. He greenlights the stunts before the scripts. He’s the last actor in Hollywood designing blockbusters around physical action instead of digital illusion.

He’s an unadopted Wachowski. A man trying to make films that still make you say, How in the world did they do that?—not What software did they use?

And it’s working. Top Gun: Maverick hauled in $1.5 billion and helped pull theaters back from the brink. Even Dead Reckoning, in a crowded release slate, outperformed most green-screened franchises struggling to recapture relevance.

Because when you go to a Tom Cruise movie, you’re not just watching a character on a screen.

You’re watching a man still willing to sprint straight into danger—just to show you what movies can do.

And yes, Tom, I was having a blast.