Tom Cruise has a number of successful film roles under his belt, but one that never quite worked for multiple reasons was Jack Reacher.
Tom Cruise is one of the biggest movie stars in the world and has been a constant for audiences, having hit films for four decades. Breaking out in the 1980s with films like Risky Business, Top Gun, and Days of Thunder, Cruise transitioned into the 90s by working with some of the best directors like of all time, with Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible, and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report cementing him as one of the most dedicated actors alive.
His latest film, Top Gun: Maverick, has become the surprise hit of the summer and has become his highest-grossing film of all time and the first time the actor has made a movie to cross $1 billion at the box office worldwide. The actor is currently working on the seventh and eighth films in his popular Mission: Impossible franchise, one that has been going since 1996. However, one franchise that Cruise tried his best to launch, Jack Reacher, just never quite clicked.
The film was meant to become a franchise starter, but it took over four years for Paramount Pictures to make a sequel. In 2016, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back opened in theaters and performed far lower than the previous film, with $58.7 million domestically and $162 million worldwide. That was $56 million less than its predecessor while also having a bigger budget, putting a nail in the coffin for the film series. The next year, another attempted Tom Cruise movie franchise would fall flat, with the 2017 film The Mummy.
Since then, the Jack Reacher franchise has been given new life with a television show titled Reacher on Amazon Prime Video starring Alan Ritchson in the lead role. Yet one would imagine a movie star like Tom Cruise, who has headlined some of the biggest movies of all time, should have been able to take this book series and turn it into a popular film franchise. Why did it not work? A combination of Cruise's own star power hurting the project and the source material actively working against him might have been the downfall of this potential franchise.
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