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