Tom Cruise runs so much in his movies that its become his trademark: its not a Tom Cruise movie if there arent any shots of his crazed sprinting away from danger. Cruise himself even references his tendency to run in his own Twitter bio. But theres more to the Cruise Canter than meets the eye. According to a new report from review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the more Cruise sprints in his movies, the better they are.
“We counted every instance of Cruises 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 reports introduction explains, before launching into a categorization of every time Cruise has made so much as a hop forward in all of his movies, from 0 feet to “Full Tom” (1001+ feet). For example, in Valkyrie Cruise doesnt run at all, whereas in Minority Report and Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation he races across the screen toward or away from some threat.
The top Tom Cruise movies, according to his pedometer, are:
- Mission: Impossible III – 3,212 feet
- Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol – 3,066 feet
- 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
More likely than not, if Tom Cruise runs in one of his movies, its probably going to be a good one. “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,” the Tomatoes team found. “And the same movies make more money at the box office, with an average inflated international gross of $538 million.”
The Mummy, in which Cruise has a prolonged sprint away from a demonic sandstorm, does throw a wrench into the results, but, look, no scientific experiment is ever perfect.
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