Tom Cruise has been in 44 movies since 1986, but thanks to Top Gun: Maverick reviews, he now has the highest average Rotten Tomatoes score of his 40-year career. Cruise is certainly no stranger to praise from movie critics, but the last few years have seen some of his best-reviewed movies, bringing his average score in Rotten Tomatoes to the highest it’s ever been.

The first movie Tom Cruise is credited with is Endless Love, but his lead role in Risky Business is what really put him on the map, leading to one of the most high-profile filmographies in Hollywood. In his decades-spanning career, Cruise has seen a number of small transformations, but his more recent insistence on performing his own insane stunts on-screen has led to a string of action movies with some of the best Rotten Tomatoes scores of his career.

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Related: Does Tom Cruise Fly In Top Gun 2?

In addition to performing his own stunts, Cruise’s reputation as a pilot also served as a big talking point for his role in American Made, perfectly setting the stage for him to reprise the role of Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick. While the original Top Gun wasn’t very well-reviewed, Top Gun: Maverick has one of the highest Rotten Tomatoes scores of cruise’s career, bringing the average for his entire filmography to its highest point ever.

Top Gun: Maverick Gives Tom Cruise His Best 3 Back-to-Back Rotten Tomatoes Scores


Tom Cruise in Top Gun Maverick

Tom Cruise is on the best-reviewed stretch of his career with four of his last seven movies (Edge of Tomorrow, Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, and now Top Gun: Maverick) earning scores over the 90 percent mark (with a fifth movie, American Made, scoring 85 percent). Cruise has enjoyed a number of movies with scores in the low 90s or high 80s over the course of his career, but the last decade has seen more than half of them, although thanks to a few critically lambasted movies (such as The Mummy‘s 16 percent Rotten Tomatoes score), his average for the last 10 years, 68 percent, is only three points higher than his 65 percent career average.

That success only seems to be heating up, as Cruise’s last two movies, Mission: Impossible – Fallout and Top Gun: Maverick are tied for the highest score of his career, with American Made‘s 85 percent giving his last three movies a 93 percent average. The next highest 3-movie average Cruise has ever seen was in 2002-2004, consisting of Minority Report, The Last Samurai, and Collateral. His 93 percent three-movie average is so high, only two other movies in his career can match it – Edge of Tomorrow (94 percent) and Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation (94 percent), both of which happened in the last decade.

The 1990s Were Tom Cruise’s Best Rotten Tomatoes Decade


Jerry pointing in Jerry Maguire

While the last 10 years has seen most of Cruise’s biggest Rotten Tomatoes scores, the 1990s is actually the best decade of his career. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back‘s 38 percent and The Mummy‘s 16 percent (and the exclusion of Top Gun: Maverick since it released after 2020) brought Cruise’s average Rotten Tomatoes score for the 2010s down to 66 percent. Meanwhile, his lowest scores in the 90s were Days of Thunder with 38 percent and Far and Away with 50 percent, and every other movie that decade (he appeared in nine total) was Fresh, with an overall average of 69 percent for the whole decade.

Related: Top Gun 2 & Mission Impossible 8 Both Have The Same Tom Cruise Dilemma

Cruise’s highest-scoring movie in the ’90s is also one of his most iconic roles, Jerry Maguire in 1996, which scored 84 percent. Magnolia (83 percent), Eyes Wide Shut (75 percent), Mission: Impossible (66 percent), and Interview With The Vampire (64 percent) make up the rest of the decade, comprising six Fresh Rotten Tomatoes scores in a row, his longest Fresh streak.

Top Gun: Maverick Gives Tom Cruise Rotten Tomatoes a New All-Time High


Top Gun Maverick Tom Cruise sunset

Cruise has never struggled with Rotten reviews, only ever seeing two Rotten scores in a row, but a few early Rotten scores meant his overall average prior to Risky Business was only 48.6 percent, with Risky Business bringing the average to just 55.83 percent. His score has steadily trickled up since then, starting the 1990s at 57 percent, starting the 2000s at 62.64 percent, starting the 2010s at 63.47 percent, and sitting at 64.38 percent before the release of Top Gun: Maverick, although he had a slightly higher 64.95 a few movies earlier thanks to Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation right before the back to back Rotten hits from Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (38 percent) and The Mummy (16 percent).

Despite the small mid-2010s setback, the 1, 2, 3 punch of American Made (85 percent), Mission: Impossible – Fallout (97 percent), and Top Gun: Maverick (97 percent), his Rotten Tomatoes career average finally tipped past 65 percent to 65.14 percent. It may not seem like a huge spread, going up by only a few percent each decade, the less-than-one percent growth from Top Gun: Maverick shows just how slowly his average score changes thanks to the four decades of movies under his belt.

Tom Cruise is set to turn 60 this year, but with two more Mission: Impossible movies on the way, his hot-streak doesn’t look like it’s set to slow down any time soon. Of course, he could always see a dip in his score as he does every few years, but Cruise’s four movies with Mission Impossible 7 and 8 director Christopher McQuarrie average 87 percent (95 percent if you only count Mission Impossible scores), the odds seem very much in his favor. Top Gun: Maverick may be his career’s highest point so far, but it could also just be the first movie of his career’s best decade.