With a back-catalog of incredible movies, Tom Cruise almost guarantees box office success—but it all comes at a price.
The Top Gun, Rain Man and Collateral star returns to theaters with the seventh and penultimate Mission: Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Another movie with a huge budget, but one that is sure to make hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars worldwide.
Cruise, now 61 years old, is known for doing his own stunts in his action movies, and his advancing age hasn’t stopped him from getting stuck in.
Tom Cruise attends the “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” premiere at Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center on July 10, 2023 in New York City. Newsweek set out to find out how much it costs to insure Tom Cruise for his action movies.MIKE COPPOLA/WIREIMAGE
Dead Reckoning Part One was filmed at the same time as Part Two, which has been announced as the final movie in the Mission: Impossible franchise. The films have already made over $3.5 billion at the box office, with the next two likely to take it to around $5 billion.
With so much money involved, it could have all come crumbling down if anything happened to the face of the franchise, Cruise.
With that in mind, Newsweek set out to find out how much it would cost movie studios to insure Tom Cruise.
Calculating the Cost of Cruise
Movie studios take out insurance policies on their biggest stars during filming, in case anything happens to jeopardize a project.
Marc Federman, of San Francisco-based Epic Insurance Brokers & Consultants, has worked in the movie industry for decades. Speaking to Newsweek, he laid out how a studio will put a value on its actors.
“The film insurance market place is tightening with the average premiums for film production approximating 3 percent of the films budget,” he explained. “Included in the 3 percent estimate is the cost of ‘cast insurance’ which coverage covers the productions extra expenses incurred due to a covered accident, sickness, or death.”
When considering the case of Cruise for Mission: Impossible, or any other action film he shoots, it’s likely his insurance figure would rise due to his hands on approach.
“The premium can be surcharged significantly due to stunts,” Federman told Newsweek. “The additional premium is determined after a thorough review of anticipated stunts and steps required to be taken to minimize the hazardous stunts being contemplated.”
He continued: “If a film’s budget were $100,000,000 the insurance deposit premiums, not including workers compensation, would be $3,000,000. Included in the estimate is the cast insurance for six-eight leads.”
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The higher the budget of the movie, the more expensive the insurance costs on a star would be. If Cruise were a small indie-movie actor, the insurance premiums would be much lower. Federman added: “The final insurance costs is determined after the film is completed. Adjustments are made as a function of the final costs of production.”
With this in mind, it’s possible to put together an estimate for how much it would cost to insure Cruise, based on the budget of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.
The seventh Mission: Impossible movie had a budget of $291 million, according to Deadline. Based on Federman’s estimate, $9.7 million of that budget would have been spent on insurance premiums alone.
While there are a lot of factors to take insurance out on, it’s fair to assume that a decent portion on that would be taken out on Cruise, the star, the producer, and the man who’s at the center of a myriad of stunts in the movie. The number to insure Cruise for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One would be significantly less than $9.7 million, but could very well be in the millions still.
Early reactions for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One have been overwhelmingly positive, suggesting the movie will claw back a significant portion of its massive budget.
While Cruise seemed to come out of the shooting of the movie unscathed on this occasion, not everything went off without a hitch.
Production on the movie was shut down due to COVID protocols in April 2021, surely costing the producers large sums of money. While filming in Birmingham, U.K., Cruise’s bag and $136,000 BMW were stolen, however the car was shortly recovered by police.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is available to watch in movie theaters now.
