Tom Cruise has sprinted a little over 24,000 feet on screen throughout his 37 years in the movies...His tendency to run – a lot – in his 41 films has become a thing of legend – online, you'll find 19-minute video supercuts of his sprints and
style breakdowns that note his stellar form: Eyes forward, elbows sharp, feet a blur. But
does all that running make for better movies? That's what we've investigated here, comparing the amount of running Tom does in movies to the amount of money Tom's movies make and the amount of Freshness they score on the Tomatometer.
The
methodology was simple, if time-consuming: We counted every instance of Cruise's running on screen, in seconds, and then calculated the distances ran by assuming he is clocking a six-minute mile (14.6 feet per second). The result is a list of estimated distances for each film that we believe is the solidest you'll find in the online canon of Tom Cruise Running Materials. We then split his movies into four different distance categories, ranging from Zero Feet all the way to 1,000-Plus Feet, to spot the trends.
The
biggest trend? Movies featuring Cruise running more than 1,000 feet have a higher Tomatometer average (a huge 71%) 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. We also found that the age-defying star has been increasing his movie running as he gets older: he covered almost the same amount of ground in 2006's
Mission: Impossible III (3,212 feet) than he did in the entirety of the 1980s (12 movies, 3,299 feet ran), and five of his top 10 running films were released after 2010 – the year he would turn 48.
