According to data, the more that Tom Cruise runs in a film, the better the film performs

Tom Cruise - everyone’s favourite Scientologist - loves a good sprint in his movies. Really loves to just have a big old run and a gallop and a whisk. But did you know there’s a reason for this? Yeah, he’s doing it because he wants to make more money (fair enough), and the more he runs, the more money he makes. 

It might sounds strange and unrelated, but according to Rotten Tomatoes, who did a very in-depth deep dive into the distance Cruise runs in his movies, it works out better for everyone when he goes farther.

Better for him because he rakes in more dough, and better for us because run-heavy films also correlate to better Rotten Tomatoes scores.

Here’s how they did it:

“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.”

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And it turned out that:

“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.”

Here are the ten Cruise movies with the longest distance covered:

1. Mission: Impossible III - 3,212 feet
2. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol – 3,066 feet
3. War of the Worlds – 1,752 feet
4. Minority Report – 1,562 feet
5. The Firm – 1,241 feet
6. Edge of Tomorrow – 1,065 feet
7. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back – 1,051 feet
8. The Mummy – 1,022 feet
9. Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation – 1,007 feet
10. Vanilla Sky – 832 feet

Unfortunately, the theory is not water-tight, however - as you may have deduced from the above list. For example, both Jack Reacher: Never Go Back and The Mummy were box-office disappointments, with $171 million and $425 million internationally, and their RT scores were on the “nat-so-good” end of the scale, too (37% and 15%). But hey, no concept can be completely scientifically accurate, can it - you gotta throw a couple of spanners in here and there, to keep things interesting.

And regardless, it’s not going to stop Tom Cruise either running, or making lots of money, is it? That’s just what he does, OK?

You can see Tom Cruise running in Mission: Impossible - Fallout in cinemas now

(Image: Paramount Pictures)