CRUISE WAS DISGRACED IN THE PUBLIC EYE IN (SUMMER 2005).

Now they just keep using the nondescript but (crucially) obedient Christopher McQuarrie, who has done as much to flatter Cruise for audiences as his publicist.

Cruise was disgraced in the public eye in the mid-2000s. (His infamous episode on Oprah Winfrey’s couch, committed while promoting War of the Worlds in the summer of 2005, was, depending on whom you ask, either the beginning of the end or his professional nadir.) I suspect this explains a lot about the trajectory of his career thereafter. 2006’s Mission: Impossible 3 was a gentle reminder: Tom was still Tom, same as ever. His cameo in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder (replete with bald cap and chain, dancing to Flo Rida), meanwhile seemed calculated to endear people to Cruise anew — or at least to persuade those making fun of him that he had a sense of Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence can’t command the interest of the movie-going public in the way that stars like Cruise could even a decade ago. Crowds flock to appealing properties, like The Avengers or Jurassic World, rather than to the names that happen to be in them.

Who has succeeded Cruise of the younger generation? Ryan Gosling? Channing Tatum? Admired, maybe, and in some quarters beloved. But compared to how bright Cruise once shone such stars seem rather dim. You’d need to look to fantasy to begin to find a suitable peer: Jon Snow and Captain America, Wonder Woman and the clown from It. The landscape of entertainment in 2017 isn’t loomed over by mere mortals. It’s dominated by characters from franchises and universes, TV shows and remakes of well-worn older films.