OVP: Days of Thunder (1990)

Film: Days of Thunder (1990)

Stars: Tom Cruise, Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Nicole Kidman, Michael Rooker, Cary Elwes

Director: Tony Scott

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Tom Cruise: click here to learn more about Mr. Cruise (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Like several of the actors we've profiled this year, Tom Cruise has had his share of celebrity run-ins in the romance department.  Despite decades of rumors to the contrary, all of his public-facing relationships have been with women, including dalliances with Melissa Gilbert, Rebecca de Morney, Cher, & Penelope Cruz.  He would have a first, brief marriage to actress Mimi Rogers (an actress most audiences might not know now but was ubiquitous for love interest and eventually "mom/best friend" supporting parts in the 1980's & 90's), and he would eventually have a very fascinating third marriage to Dawson's Creek star Katie Holmes (which we'll get into next week).  But for most moviegoers, when you think of Tom Cruise's wife, you think of Nicole Kidman.  For the entirety of the 1990's, coming off of their meeting on this film (and subsequent marriage), there was really no bigger couple in Hollywood that could compete with Tom & Nicole (and this was the era of the tabloid-friendly super-couple, with Goldie Hawn & Kurt Russell, Susan Sarandon & Tim Robbins, Kim Basinger & Alec Baldwin, Demi Moore & Bruce Willis, and Dennis Quaid & Meg Ryan all providing sturdy counter to, say, the romantic lives of Julia Roberts or Madonna, which were plastered all over your supermarket checkout).  It's worth noting, especially now given that they are on pretty equal standing in the cultural conversation, that this was much more one-sided in the 90's: Kidman would give good performances, but she was very much "Tom Cruise's wife" and not a leading lady star in the same way he was until after their divorce.  This meant that while Cruise had a lot of major hits outside of their relationship, save for a couple of films in the late 1990's (most notably To Die For and The Peacemaker), Kidman's biggest roles happened opposite her husband.

(Spoilers Ahead) The first of these films was Days of Thunder, a movie that we think of now as a pretty conventional hit, but at the time was a really big deal in Hollywood.  The film itself is not good, and we're going to only talk about the plot for a minute because that's honestly all of the time the screenplay gives it.  The film is about Cole Trickle (Cruise), a rebellious race-car driver who builds a car with Harry Hogge (Duvall) and starts to be really good, eventually looking like he might win the Daytona 500 until a major car crash injures him and his rival Rowdy (Rooker).  Both men are seriously injured, but Cole, with the help of Dr. Claire Lewicki (Kidman) actually gets better, while Rowdy largely ignores what's happening, and basically makes his medical condition worse, eventually so that he wilil truly never drive again.  In the meantime Cole must contend with both his own ambitions (which get in the way of his romantic relationship with Claire), as well as another upstart who takes his place in the race Russ Wheeler (Elwes, and yes, the film has the Jerry Bruckheimer-esque subtlety to give a fictional professional driver the last name "Wheeler").  Eventually, Cole wins Daytona using Rowdy's car, as well as Claire's heart.

The film is not good.  For a couple that would spend the rest of the decade being discussed like they were the president and his wife by American households, Cruise & Kidman have very little chemistry (made weirder by the fact that they would have great chemistry years later in Eyes Wide Shut, which was near the end of their marriage).  More critically, Cruise doesn't have chemistry with Robert Duvall, his co-lead and a far more important relationship within the confines of the picture.  There's also way less racing than you'd assume (though the racing scenes are well-done...it's Oscar-nominated Sound work is solid).  The best part might be the music, as Days of Thunder features a solid soundtrack.

The film's spot in Hollywood history should be noted, because in a year where we have focused quite frequently on major action stars and Hollywood building films (and even franchises) around them, Days of Thunder changed that, and is spelling something of an end to this type of motion picture.  Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer in the wake of he & Cruise making the phenomenon Top Gun, the film went wildly over budget, by some estimations almost double what Bruckheimer had promised Paramount.  At nearly $60M, it was basically asking the film to make more money than most movies did at the time (i.e. it had to make north of $100M to make a profit).  While Days of Thunder did do that (it'd make $160M, a solid amount until you remember it was less-than-half of what Top Gun did), it tarnished Bruckheimer's reputation severely-he would not make another film with Paramount until 2019, and it took four years for his next film, the tiny black comedy The Ref (Bruckheimer escaped Hollywood jail with 1995's Bad Boys, a surprise success which launched Will Smith into action movie stardom, and gave Bruckheimer a new collaborator in Michael Bay, which he'd ride to major glory with dumb-but-profitable films like The Rock, Armageddon, & Pearl Harbor).  Days of Thunder is oftentimes thought of as a harbinger of things to come for the 1990's, when Hollywood's intense betting on star-driven vehicles, sometimes with insurmountable budgets, would make the decade a box office roller coaster.  And few actors got paid more consistently exorbitant fees in the 1990's than Tom Cruise

OVP: Born on the Fourth of July (1989)

Film: Born on the Fourth of July (1989)

Stars: Tom Cruise, Willem Dafoe, Kyra Sedgwick, Raymond J. Barry, Jerry Levine, Frank Whaley

Director: Oliver Stone

Oscar History: 8 nods/2 wins (Best Picture, Director*, Actor-Tom Cruise, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Film Editing*, Score, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Tom Cruise: click here to learn more about Mr. Cruise (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Growing up, Tom Cruise was not an actor that my parents liked a lot.  While stars such as Harrison Ford or Sandra Bullock being in a picture was pretty much a blank check ticket situation to see their new film, Cruise's movies were oftentimes only ones we would seek out if they had a lot of buzz.  When I would ask about this (as you can imagine, young John was always talking about movies), a big part of the reason was "I don't think he's a very good actor" which to be fair was something that was a relatively commonplace topic during much of Cruise's career with the general public.  Cruise, because of his arresting good looks (for me, it's always been the hair-Tom Cruise has spectacular hair) and the types of movies he picks (action films, franchise pictures, and romantic melodramas) has usually been dismissed as a pretty boy or a commercial star only.  This is something we've actually seen throughout this year: Errol Flynn, Charles Bronson, & Arnold Schwarzenegger were all never nominated for Oscars, and it took Sean Connery until the second act of his career to win one.

But Cruise, Cruise at the height of his fame did not seem content with being a pretty boy.  His onscreen idol was not Errol Flynn or Sean Connery...it was always Paul Newman, and Paul Newman got to be in action films and be nominated repeatedly for Oscars.  Born on the Fourth of July was not Cruise's first clear play at an Academy Award nomination (he had starred alongside Newman in The Color of Money, and the year before starred in the Best Picture winner Rain Man), but in both cases it was his costar that won Best Actor.  Born on the Fourth of July was the first time that Cruise got nominated, and it's a fascinating film that both signaled where he was headed with his career for the next decade (regularly appearing in films that were Oscar-adjacent) and also an anomaly, given it was the rare really "actorly" role that Cruise would take in his career.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Ron Kovic (Cruise), the quintessential American young man who wrestles for his school, is in love with the prettiest girl at school (Kyra Sedgwick) and devotes his passion to God and Country (specifically the Republican Party).  When fighting breaks out in Vietnam, Ron is the first to enlist, and he goes to war...and promptly realizes how much patriotism relies upon the sacrifices of an average man.  He becomes paralyzed from the waist down, unable to have children or to ever walk again, something he initially refuses (to the point where he nearly loses his legs through obstinance), and then slowly works back to reality, though first having bouts of severe alcoholism & depression.  This leads him away from the Republican Party that sent him to war, and eventually he becomes a vocal supporter of the anti-war movement, nearly being trampled during the 1972 RNC while they nominate Nixon to a landslide victory.  The film ends with this low point being countered with a high point, Kovic's real life speech at the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

It's worth noting before we get into Cruise's work here that this film is directed by Oliver Stone.  In an era where directors like Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, & Robert Zemeckis made films that were only subtly political (though politics are there, especially in Spielberg's work), Stone's films of this era were known for their hyper-political atmosphere.  Films like Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, & Nixon (all very popular with Oscar and usually with audiences) questioned authority to the point of feeling conspiratorial (as a youth who read entertainment & celebrity magazines weekly, I believe I learned the phrase "conspiracy theory" from it being linked to Oliver Stone).  The film's anti-war politics feel a bit more routine today, given that we've had decades of film that have been comfortable questioning the honestly of the US government in foreign affairs, but in 1989 it's worth noting that having the quintessential American boy next door (Tom Cruise) spouting off leftist dialogue in a year where ardent pro-Vietnam congressman George HW Bush had become president is an interesting counter.

The film itself occasionally feels underwritten as a result of the politics, mostly because Stone's politics are so well-honed into the script, sometimes at the sacrifice of character.  I loved, for example, the way that we are introduced to Kovic as a bit weak-willed (he's not the best wrestler, he doesn't have the guts to take the girl he likes to the Prom), and then seeing that the world doesn't actually care about him when he gets back.  He fervently believed in American exceptionalism, and in giving himself as a sacrifice, but when he gets back, he learns as he matures into a true adult that his sacrifice meant little to the people he did it on behalf of (and much of that was just talk, not deed), and those who stayed behind profited in his absence, or worse yet, simply want him to go away.  The cruelty of his not being perfect is felt on his parents, who want their old son back...and hate their new one (the relationship between Ron & his mother is really well done because it's so uncomfortable).  But this also means that we rarely get to know much about the side characters (Sedgwick and Willem Dafoe feel pretty two-dimensional from actors we know can do more), and I wanted to understand more about what made this story specific than trying to make it feel universal to fit Stone's lecture to the viewer.

As for Cruise?  I liked him in this.  I think Cruise, at the time very willing to mess with his star persona, plays Ron as unlikable, oftentimes nauseatingly so, but it works for the character.  I think the way that he embraces the arrogance that comes with youth, knowing that those around you couldn't possibly be right because they've lived longer and seen more of the world (something we all go through as young adults eager to be seen as equals) is really well done.  I do wish he had had more scene partner work-there are times when it feels like he's trying to inhabit the whole screen in his scenes, needing us to KNOW the message he's trying to convey, sometimes swinging a bit from scene-to-scene without giving consistency is an issue (though more the writer's fault), but this is proof of something I already know (I disagree with my parents on this one): Tom Cruise, when he wants to be, is a fine actor.

Are Democrats Missing Out in South Carolina?

Dr. Annie Andrews (D-SC)

It is odd, in many respects, that the 2020 election scarred Democrats in the way that it did given they literally won a trifecta that year.  But if you look at the Senate races that year, you understand that there is a lot of residual scarring.  Every cycle has a few elections where you lose, but it is close.  In 2020, the Democrats got relatively close in North Carolina, Iowa, and (once you factor in the RCV aspect) Maine; these races weren't wins, but they deserved the money that was showered upon them by small dollar donors.

But it's other races that cycle that got WAY too much attention and in the process became absolute sucks on the bank accounts of Democrats hoping to capitalize on what appeared to be a blue wave.  In the Montana Senate race, Democrats spent $82 million on behalf of former Governor Steve Bullock, only to lose by 10-points.  In Kentucky, Amy McGrath raised $96M in total, and yet got clobbered by Mitch McConnell (the phrase "no more McGraths!" has become a slogan for smart fundraising as a result of this race).  And then in South Carolina, Democrat Jaime Harrison raised $132M, more than George W. Bush raised for the entire 2000 presidential campaign...and still lose by 10-points.  Polling had born out that at least Harrison & Bullock were in competitive races, but Democrats felt smarted by it, and as you can see in 2026, where the Democrats are outpolling Republicans but being dwarfed in fundraising, it feels like the ghosts of these races are keeping them from getting money in reach seats because Democrats felt they were cheated out of their cash that cycle.

I bring up Harrison specifically, because if there's a race that feels like a "is this real?" with polling right now, it's South Carolina.  The contest, which pits Sen. Darline Graham (R), the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham who was appointed to his seat after his death, against Dr. Annie Andrews (D), a pediatrician who ran against Nancy Mace in the swing-y first district in 2022, but lost in a landslide.  In normal scenarios, this would be a good race to ignore.  Trump dominated here in 2024, winning the state by 18-points, and no Democrat has won a Senate race in the Palmetto State this century.

But polling does show a competitive race here.  The average polling from all major polling aggregate sites puts Graham up by about 1.6% right now.  For comparison sake, Mary Peltola, Sherrod Brown, and Abdul El-Sayed, all in "tossup" races lead by less than this, and Andrews' deficit would put her roughly in the same camp as Josh Turek, Dan Osborn, Adam Hamilton, & Troy Jackson, all of whom are getting much more attention & money from national Democrats.  It's worth noting that the Senate Leadership Fund (the main super PAC of Senate Republicans) is sending $5 million to bolster Graham, and both President Trump & Sen. John Thune are expected to campaign alongside Graham in the coming weeks.

Yet if you talk to most people about the race, they ignore it, as do most major Democratic fundraising arms.  As I said-South Carolina doesn't come close to the attention that Kansas, Iowa, or Maine are getting, and major prediction outlets like the Cook Political Report, Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, and the Silver Bulletin all have it at "Likely R," a designation none of the other seats I listed have right now.  It'd be easy to say that it's just that South Carolina is too red, and we're just looking at fundamentals, but Trump won Kansas by a roughly similar number, and everyone is all in there.  Chuck Schumer has spent money on, Mississippi, despite it being a much more obvious longshot based on polling.

Which makes me think that Democrats are looking at Harrison's numbers six years ago, and assuming the state is simply "unwinnable" and Andrews' polling strength is a mirage...which honestly feels dangerous to me.  I don't know if Annie Andrews will win (I won't be predicting her in a few weeks), but I do think there's evidence this race is competitive, and worth the investment.  Waves oftentimes have races that pretty much no one saw coming as competitive and then they end up nearly flipping.  For example in 2014, Republicans were inches away from ousting Mark Warner in a race that Warner outraised the Republican by more than 2:1, and most sites had listed as "Likely D."  Had the Republicans bothered to invest in that race at all, they would've been able to end the Affordable Care Act.  These sorts of races don't always matter in terms of immediate majority math, but they're almost always consequential.  I am truly hoping that when election night rolls around, we are not staring at a clearly winnable race here that we ended up foregoing because Jaime Harrison's loss six years ago was so horrendous that we stopped believing in victory.

Fight for the Senate: The Majority Makers

Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX)

Yesterday, the Senate Leadership Fund pulled funding for the North Carolina Senate race.  This was not entirely unexpected.  The polling averages in the race have former Gov. Roy Cooper up by an average of 9-points, and as far as I can find, there has not been a single, solitary poll showing Cooper behind former RNC Chairman Michael Whatley.  This move is as close as you can get to national Republicans basically admitting that they are not going to win this race (though they'd never say it publicly), but if we're being honest, this race was lost pretty much the instant that Thom Tillis announced he was retiring (Tillis would've been an underdog in this environment, but he'd be doing much better than Whatley is).

But this move does something to the math for the Senate Democrats-it gets them one step closer to winning back a Senate majority, which they lost two years ago when Donald Trump won a second term.  North Carolina has long been the easiest pickup of the bunch, but easy pickups still count, and in order for the Democrats to get a Senate majority, they need a minimum of four seats; the Republicans basically giving up and conceding this race to Cooper means that we only have three to go.

What's weird is that while (for months) it's not been clear exactly what the Senate majority would look like given (other than North Carolina and Maine) there were no pickup opportunities in states that Trump won by less than ten points up in 2026, to me the map is pretty simple now.  The Democrats, should they win the majority probably need to win four specific seats: North Carolina, Texas, Alaska, & Maine.  If they win these seats, the majority feels assured...if they miss even one of these seats, I'd argue that they probably didn't get a majority.

This isn't to say these are the only competitive seats, because they're not.  The Republicans are unlikely to pickup a seat (though they seem to have at least a theoretical chance in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota, though all states the Democrat is clearly favored, albeit in Minnesota the Democrat's campaign is so bad the lousy polling feels self-inflicted in the way it isn't in MI/NH...for my money Peggy Flanagan is running the worst Senate campaign from a Democrat that we'll probably still win in at least a few cycles).  More likely, there are other Democratic pickup opportunities, with the most-commonly cited ones being in Ohio, Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska (probably in that order).  Any of those four seats could counter if the Democrats lose one of these contests.

But if you asked me to pick the easiest path specifically to 51, it'd be NC/TX/ME/AK.  Polling and logic bear this out.  North Carolina we've already discussed, but in most public polling Texas & Alaska have shown the Democrats in a strong position.  There's differing reasons for this, with Alaska getting there by the Democrats nominating the only person who possibly could've won (former Rep. Mary Peltola) while in Texas the Republicans chose literally the only person who could possibly have lost (AG Ken Paxton), but polling shows Peltola and Talarico in a very strong position, with Talarico arguably in a better spot.  Polls can be wrong (don't I know it), but polls would need to be basically catastrophically wrong at this point for Talarico to lose.  Unless a late-breaking scandal busts (and with over $100M in ad spending and still no movement in Texas, I doubt one is coming), I think Talarico has to be called the frontrunner, as uncomfortable as that makes me saying in Texas.

But this also poses a dilemma.  In the same way that California & New York have become synonymous with Democratic politics, Texas is a Republican state.  It is, in fact THE Republican state.  It is also, thanks to having so many dense population centers across San Antonio, Austin, Houston, & Dallas, a very expensive state to have a Senate campaign in, so trying to turn the tide in the state costs gargantuan sums of money.  As a result, if they actually care about their Senate majority, the GOP would do the smart thing and triage TX in the same way that they are North Carolina.  It's clear at this point that money isn't going to help the cause on ads in TX...instead, if Paxton wins, it'll solely be because angry-at-Trump Republicans in the state couldn't ultimately vote for a Democrat, even against a Republican they hate.  But there are states like Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, & Ohio where the Democrats are in much closer-to-tossup races, and those states surely could use the money more than in Texas.  And if they care about the majority, they should be giving that money to help Susan Collins.

In my mind, as hard as it is to believe given the state's voting history, the tipping point state has shifted not to Alaska or Texas, but to Maine, a state the Kamala Harris won in 2024, and hasn't voted for a Republican for president since 1988.  Sen. Susan Collins (R) is an electoral juggernaut, and Senate President Troy Jackson (D) is running an underwhelming campaign.  I said this at the time, but I did say that picking our nominee to face Collins (a shrewd retail campaigner) from a pile of people Hannah Pingree had just vanquished was a bad idea, but no one listened to me, and now we're stuck with Jackson and need to get him across the finish line.  Unlike Paxton & Dan Sullivan in Alaska, Collins regularly shows up in decent shape in polls, and you'd argue the race is probably a tossup.  I place it as the tipping point state over Ohio (which honestly has more consistent Democratic leads) largely due to the state's inherent blue bias-even the tied polls between Collins & Jackson give Jackson more upside to gain, because literally all he has to do is convince Harris voters to elect a Democrat (also...why the hell hasn't Kamala Harris campaigned with him yet...one of the few races she'd make a difference & I'm seeing nothing).  Both sides could use money and support here...and it's hard to argue at this point that triaging Texas, which could well be a lost cause, is the smart decision both for the majority and to prevent a bloodbath (and majorly hurting their 2028 chances) in other R-held tossup seats.  That the Republicans aren't willing to do this either says to me that they don't seem to have a gage on what is happening right now, or are unwilling to cede Texas because of its synonymous status with the GOP brand...even if that means that they might be giving up the Senate majority with that stubborness.

Legend (1986)

Film: Legend (1986)

Stars: Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry

Director: Ridley Scott

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Makeup)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Tom Cruise: click here to learn more about Mr. Cruise (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Tom Cruise's early career in many ways belies a lot of the stories we've talked about this season of people like Charles Bronson and Sylvester Stallone having to struggle in supporting roles for a while before they ended up as leading men.  Cruise after coming to Hollywood at the age of just 18, got a small role in Endless Love, but just a few months later had a plum role Taps from 20th Century Fox.  Quickly following this was the one-two-three punch of The Outsiders, All the Right Moves, and Risky Business.  All of these films turned a profit, but it was Risky Business, where Cruise's most famous scene would find him jamming out in his underwear to Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock-and-Roll" that would send him into the stratosphere.  The film made 10x its budget, and by-and-large, that was pretty much it for Cruise-he would be a movie star for the rest of his life (aware that saying this the same weekend his Oscar vehicle that is no longer such a thing Digger is bombing will feel cheeky, but let's be honest-he'll bounce back with a sequel to one of his many hits)...though it's possible that today's movie might've held threatened that dominance.  Cruise took one of only a few risks in his career (again, Digger being another) that didn't click with audiences in the spring of 1986 with Legend, a strange Ridley Scott fantasy-adventure that audiences hated.  Had this been an indication of where his career was going, he might've been more of an Emilio Estevez or Rob Lowe-style 1980's fixture...but just a month after Legend tanked at the domestic box office was the world premiere of Top Gun, which would become the highest-grossing film of 1986 and spawn Cruise's first franchise.

(Spoilers Ahead) But because I have seen Risky Business and Top Gun (and this series is about me discovering new films), and honestly because it didn't occur to me to watch The Outsiders even though that would've been a totally good choice for this...we're doing Legend.  The movie is about Jack (Cruise), a forest child who lives in a fantasy realm where darkness and winter are held off by two magical and precious unicorns.  At one point Jack's love interest, Princess Lili (Sara) attempts to touch one of the unicorns despite his protestations, and it runs off...and has its horn cut off by goblins.  They work for a character called Darkness (Curry), an evil demon of sorts who wants to slay both unicorns in hopes of bringing total darkness back to the world.  While Jack is working with wood elves and a fairy-in-disguise to help fix the unicorn (and protect the other one), Lili is taken captive by Darkness and made into her evil, sexy bride...but she eventually tricks him and frees the unicorn, who thanks to Jack helping to kill Darkness and connect the unicorn's horn to the horse, we see goodness brought back to the world.

Here's the deal-Legend is not much more than that plot.  The film has become something of a cult classic, as is oftentimes the case for fantasy films of the 1980's that bomb (see also The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth), particularly for Curry's campy portrayal of a roided out demon who is obsessively horny for Mia Sara's Lili.  So if you're going into it, you either need to be super into the aesthetic, or you really need to like the characters.  I wasn't very sold on the aesthetic, though Curry's Oscar-nominated makeup is making some solid points (and clearly influenced the future Hellboy movie design), but you have to buy hard into the somewhat homoerotic nature of the picture to really enjoy it on a camp level (between the excessive amount of glitter every character seems to wear to Cruise's 4" inseam shorts while still wearing a shiny gold breast plate, this is really doubling up with the volleyball scene in Top Gun in terms of awakening young gay men of 1986).

The characters are also super unlikable.  Curry's character is so underwritten that even an actor as skilled as he can't pull this totally off (though he's clearly having a blast in this role), but he's better than the other two.  Cruise's character is in love with Lili, but honestly you have no idea why as Lili is a spoiled brat, and doesn't change enough by the end to really justify the audience rooting for her.  The film itself apparently has three different endings; the one I saw had Jack & Lili ending up together but Darkness still lurking in the void, plotting his revenge, while there are others that don't have them end up together or any mention of Darkness still existing.  I personally think that the best option here would've been them staying apart, as Jack is magical in a way that Lili isn't, and they really don't make sense in the same world.  Either way, though, this sets up a weird sort of dichotomy because as we'll see in the next few weeks, both onscreen and in real-life, Cruise doesn't always get the girl.

Saturdays with the Stars: Tom Cruise

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we discussed Sylvester Stallone, a man who made equal parts celebrated action blockbusters alongside a string of films that would have the Razzies call him "the Worst Actor of the Century."  This month, we'll talk about a man a couple decades Stallone's junior, but who was his peer in action films throughout the 1980's & early 1990's.  That might be the only thing that Stallone and our October star have in common, though.  Our star this month would have considerably more success in films outside of the explosion-heavy genre that was Stallone's trapping, would be recognized as a superior actor, and would become a far more fascinating tabloid celebrity, with his romantic relationships, and controversial religion nearly throwing apart his career before being reclaimed in recent years as "the last movie star."  This month's star is Tom Cruise.

Despite being born with the seemingly stodgy moniker of Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, the future Jerry Maguire grew up extremely poor, with an abusive father and a deeply Catholic mother.  When his parents divorced when Cruise was a teenager, he aspired to become a priest, even attending seminary in Cincinnati (reports differ on why he ultimately abandoned this dream).  After high school, while he briefly went to New York to pursue acting, he found far better luck in Hollywood, almost instantly getting movie work in Endless Love, and then his breakout role in Taps.  This was followed by All the Right Moves, Risky Business, and in 1986, he appeared in Top Gun.  At the age of only 24, Tom Cruise had become one of the most famous men in America...

...a position he's never really given up.  Cruise's career has had setbacks, but by-and-large he's never really had a long period of time where he wasn't making massive blockbusters.  Unlike some of the men we've talked about this year, he wasn't always getting into them through action franchises, though his work in the Mission Impossible, Top Gun, & Jack Reacher series all helped him immensely.  Cruise at his peak could launch courtroom dramas, romantic comedies, pretty much everything but a musical (sorry Rock of Ages).  He also, despite a surface-level squeaky clean persona (very few of his costars have anything but good things to say about him) was involved in two extremely high-profile divorces from famous actresses who have largely avoided the type of tell-all books that typically follow such splits, and has been the face of the 20th Century's most controversial religious movement.  We'll get into all of that, as well as some of the biggest movies of Cruise's career (which I've inexplicably missed) this month.

How Wrong Will the Polls Be?

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)

Political watchers, if they watch long enough, are constantly haunted by losing certain races.  In the same way that, say, Minnesota Vikings fans will never entirely get over Gary Anderson's missed field goal at the 1998 NFC Championship game (which cost us a spot in a Super Bowl we would have gone in as favorites to win), there are political races that scar a certain generation of political watchers, and that never really heals, and occasionally feels like it impacts their judgment.

The Maine 2020 Senate race seems to have done this to a generation of Democrats, and there's a reason for that.  Headed into Election Night 2020, the Democrats had every reason to assume the best.  Joe Biden had been leading in the polls in most swing states, and the Democrats appeared posed to win not just the White House, but also to win back the US Senate after six years in the wilderness, and make gains headed into the House.  It looked like Biden would end the long national nightmare that Trump had wielded over the Democrats for four years.  And to a degree, that happened.  Biden did win an impressive popular vote victory, though his slim margins in key swing states like Georgia, Arizona, & Wisconsin meant a second consecutive Trump term was a closer call than we had realized.  But the congressional victories, while ultimately successful in getting Dems those majorities, came with a lot of headaches, with Republicans doing unexpectedly well down-ballot, no more so than in Maine.  Headed into the night, Real Clear Politics had State House Speaker Sara Gideon at a +6.5 margin spread in aggregate polling, while 270 to Win had her at +3.8.  It seemed probable that Sen. Susan Collins' vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh was going to cost her greatly, and Gideon would become the first Democrat elected to the US Senate since 1988, but that didn't happen.  Collins win margin of over 8-points was extra salt in the wound.  Never mind that it was due in part to Maine's use of Ranked-Choice Voting, and Gideon probably would've gotten closer to 47-48% of the vote in the end had Collins not squeaked over 50% of the vote: it made Collins look invincible, and it made the polling look like a joke.

I'm seeing a lot of talk online, both in articles about the midterm elections in five weeks and on social media, asking the question of whether or not the Democrats are headed toward another bout of polling that could point to disaster like it did for them in Maine in 2020.  This is partially because Democrats, as a species, are allergic to good news.  Show me a Democrat who isn't panicking before an election, and I'll show you someone who is either on a great prescription drug or is secretly a Republican; Democrats always panic until the results are called, while Republicans can march over-confident to their doom if that's what it takes.  A big reason for this is the scope of a 2026 win if you look at aggregate polling.  If aggregate polling across platforms like 270 to Win, Decision Desk HQ, & Silver Bulletin were exactly right at this exact moment (I said exact twice for a reason...these metrics shift pretty quickly toward the end of election season so I don't want to be called out in the comments if suddenly a new poll changes one of these races narratives!) the Democrats would pickup six Senate seats in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, & Texas, and would (depending on which site you go with) also be looking at pickups in Kansas & Nebraska.  They also wouldn't be at risk of losing any of the races in Georgia, Minnesota, New Hampshire, or Michigan that are oftentimes listed as a potential risk, and the Republicans would be looking at their closest margin in South Carolina in decades.  A 6-8 seat pickup for the Democrats, mainly in states that Donald Trump won in 2024 by double-digits is a bit more good news than the Democrats can believe without actual results.

So I thought it'd be worth looking at the aggregate polling sites for the past three cycles in the Senate to look at how many called the victor wrong.  And when I say wrong, I mean the eventual winner, not the margin; there are a lot of situations like South Carolina in 2020 where aggregate polling showed Lindsey Graham in a much more competitive race than he actually was...but still showed him winning.  The races I want to look at are specifically ones that the aggregate was truly wrong, that they called a winner that never was.

In that case, there's a limited list of options for the past three cycles.  Susan Collins in 2020 is obviously one of them, but she's joined by only four other races: the aggregate polling missed the wins of Thom Tillis (R-NC) in 2020, as well as John Fetterman (D-PA) & Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) in 2022, and Dave McCormick (R-PA) in 2024.  It's worth noting that not all aggregate polling sites weigh and factor the same polls, so both Arizona in 2022 (Democrat Mark Kelly) and Ohio in 2024 (Republican Bernie Moreno) both had some sites saying they were headed to defeat, while others thought polling showed they'd lose narrowly.  Overall, 5-7 seats in total, no more than 3 in a night, and no less than two.

Extrapolating this out, if we assume that the polling aggregates don't change between now and November 3rd (a very big "if" given the number of undecideds in some polls, especially in South Carolina, Kansas & Nebraska), the Democrats would need a gargantuan polling miss, much worse than any of the last three cycles, to not win the majority.  Even if three of the eight seats that currently look like flips were to go red...the Democrats would still be at 52, a healthy majority (one no one could've guessed with a straight face even on Memorial Day, much less last year).

It's also not out of the question that it's the Democrats who are under-polled here.  Look at the above lists.  All of them are uniform in each cycle of who got missed (2020 it was two Republicans, 2022 it was three Democrats, and in 2024 it was two Republicans).  In all cases, the party that we didn't realize had quite as much strength as it did on election night ended up getting the gain, and that's not the same as who won the night (i.e. in 2020 the Republicans were stronger than realized on Election Night...even on a night that the Democrats ultimately won a trifecta).  We will not know until election night overall which party was stronger than we realized (see 2022 for a case of the incumbent party doing better than expected, 2014 for a night where they did worse).  It is assumed, given how sunny this polling is, that it's the Democrats that are being over-polled (also because getting the polls wrong when the Democrats end up winning more seems to be a sin that the national media is far more willing to forgive than the reverse).  But with rising gas prices, Trump's gargantuan disapproval ratings, and the administration's inability to stick to a narrative (yesterday scaring countless communities reliant on higher education money by upending the rules on student loan approval), it's possible that the Democrats are the ones who might be under-polled, in which case those mixed bag aggregate states like Kansas & Nebraska (or even South Carolina) could be where the surprise win happens, and in that case it might involve a blue checkmark.  We won't know until November 3rd, but right now, polling is pretty clear-the Democrats are the favorites to win back the US Senate in five weeks.