Tom Cruise needs to save movies — again

Success at the summer box office this year has so far been mostly Mission: Impossible. 

So much for the $2.3 billion “Avatar: The Way of Water” raked in last Christmas — movie theaters are back to being an armory of high-profile bombs. 

This weekend, wobbly Warner Bros.’ “The Flash” dropped a staggering 73% in its second week to a worldwide total of just $210 million. A more-than-50% decline for an expensive DC Comics superhero film spells trouble.

Consider that fellow Justice League member “Aquaman” made $229 million by his second weekend in the US and Canada alone.

Pixar’s uninspired “Elemental,” released June 16 and so far having grossed $121 million, will wind up as one of the Disney-owned animation studio’s biggest failures ever.

In contrast, five years ago this month, “The Incredibles 2” grossed $1.2 billion.

Disney’s live-action “The Little Mermaid” has made a $500 million trickle, which is less than half of 2017’s remake of “The Lion King.”

And “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” starring 80-year-old Harrison Ford, is projected to open this weekend to just $60 million domestically — $40 million less than 2008’s “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” 

The movie industry is trapped in an existential “Temple of Doom.” Disney execs staring at these numbers probably look like the guy in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” when his face melts off.

The only bright spot so far this summer has been Sony’s animated “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” with $560 million worldwide.

Only one man can save struggling movie theater chains. Again.

As if summoned by a desperate prayer, Tom Cruise will parachute in on July 12 with Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.”

The film is expected to open domestically to about $90 million over five days — setting a possible record for the seven-film franchise — and heaps more internationally. 

If I were Cruise, I’d be jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch. Because I would know full well that I am the only reliably bankable movie star left. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that in May 2022 as theaters were hobbling along, Cruise and his (sometimes irate) efforts to finish and release “Top Gun: Maverick” rescued cinemas around the world that had been sitting empty. 

“Maverick” was a sequel to a 36-year-old movie that millennials and Gen Z-ers who regularly flock to Marvel films couldn’t care less about. Older fans of the heartthrob-filled original had no clue if it would be any good.

But the action movie opened the Cannes Film Festival, received euphoric reviews and ultimately grossed $1.49 billion worldwide.

Harking back to the monolithic cultural moment of “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens,” seemingly everybody saw “Maverick.”

You see, what 60-year-old Cruise has managed in this phase of his career, quite brilliantly, is to become synonymous with Entertainment.

Not prestige, not awards, not sexiness nor hilarity — a Cruise movie simply means a fantastic time had by all.

Five years ago, I gave “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” four stars and called the franchise “the best ongoing action series out there.” 

Its consistent sky-high quality is, in large part, because of Cruise’s well-known insistence on doing his own stunts. His overachieving attitude makes his thrill-ride movies more tactile and real than anything else in the genre.

Marvel films, especially the woeful “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” feel increasingly like a 2.5-hour green screen exercise that audiences struggle to connect with.

In “Dial of Destiny,” a very obviously CGI Ford runs on top of a moving train. The sequence is alarmingly fake and hard to believe.

That Cruise regularly puts himself in harm’s way for the sake of a scene has become well-known to average moviegoers.

Plus he does it with nuclear charm and unrelenting intensity, and we feel going in that he has worked extraordinarily hard for our money. 

I suspect that in three weeks Cruise and Paramount will make a ton of it.