The more Tom Cruise runs, the better the movie seems to do. Here he is in Mission Impossible III.
Paramount Pictures
If Tom Cruise is starring in a movie, chances are at some point his character will be running.
Cruise has outrun an alien invasion in War of the Worlds, dashed across an empty Times Square in Vanilla Sky and stormed through a magical forest in Legend. Cruise's ongoing role as secret agent Ethan Hunt is where he runs the most.
So you can bet he'll be sprinting yet again as Hunt in his latest film Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
Movie review site Rotten Tomatoes crunched the numbers to determine if Cruise running has meant big bucks for his films that span almost 40 years.
The data collected shows that "movies featuring Cruise running more than 1,000 feet have a higher Tomatometer average (a huge 71 percent) 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," according to Rotten Tomatoes.
The site counted every running scene in seconds and then added into the equation that Cruise averaged a six-minute mile (or 14.6 feet per second).
And even though Cruise is getting up there in years (he's 56 years old now), he seems to be running in movies more, the older he gets.
Rotten Tomatoes determined that Cruise ran 3,212 feet in Mission: Impossible III in 2006 — which is impressive considering he ran 3,299 feet combined in his previous 12 movies during the '80s.
And with more running means more money. His top three grossing movies with the most running and box office success include: Mission: Impossible III (3,212 feet, making $133,400,000), Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (3,066 feet, making $209,364,921) and War of the Worlds (1,752 feet, making $234,141,872).
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