Credit: Far Out / 티비텐 TV10 / Sony Pictures Releasing
Tue 26 May 2026 19:45, UK
The list of actors who’ve never appeared in a superhero movie grows shorter with each passing year, but unless something drastic changes, it seems safe to assume that Tom Cruise won’t be suiting up.
After all, if you hire Tom Cruise to be in a superhero movie, then it’s not really a superhero movie anymore; it’s a Tom Cruise movie. Some actors do it for an easy paycheque or to land themselves a high-paying recurring role, but it’s not like he needs either of those things, being an obscenely wealthy A-lister.
He did have a few chats with Marvel about Iron Man back in the day, but things never went much further than that, which was probably for the best, since you can’t really imagine Cruise hanging around the studio’s shared universe for a decade like Robert Downey Jr did, and what would be the point, really, when CGI and spandex renders the death-defying stunts he loves so much as largely obsolete?
However, the diminutive daredevil could have popped up in a Spider-Man movie, of all things, under incredibly convoluted circumstances. How convoluted? Well, since the directors of the film in question couldn’t really explain it without getting bogged down in minutiae, incredibly so.
One of the most visually inventive superhero flicks of an increasingly identikit era, Bob Persichetti, Rodney Rothman, and Peter Ramsey’s animated blockbuster, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, deservedly won the Academy Award for ‘Best Animated Feature’. It’s got enough Spider-Men as it is, but it almost had another one, sort of, which would have seen Shameik Moore’s Miles Morales go well beyond the fourth wall.
“There was a movie version of a movie about Spider-Man in Miles’ universe about the real person Spider-Man, but it was a James Cameron-directed movie with Tom Cruise as Spidey,” Rothman explained. “And it was James Cameron and Spidey and Tom Cruise on the audio,” with the filmmaker elaborating that “it was literally the director’s commentary with guest star, Tom Cruise.”
Essentially, the scene would have taken place in the world in which Into the Spider-Verse is set, where the character has a biographical film made about them, which starred Cruise as the web-slinger with Cameron as the director, with the real Spider-Man, not the one being played by Cruise, serving as a technical advisor on the film-within-a-film, and sitting down for a commentary track with the Mission: Impossible star, we think.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
See what we meant by convoluted? Rothman acknowledged that, right enough. “The fact that it’s taken us almost three minutes to explain this idea to you gives you an idea of why it didn’t make it in.” It sounds a bit much to be honest, but the filmmakers did at least have a great time throwing the idea around between them, with Persichetti adding, “Oh my god, it was fun to do.”
Presumably, it wouldn’t have been Cruise providing the voice, since he’s never done a voiceover for anything in his life, and the proposed scene may not have stood a chance of making it into the finished feature anyway, since the actor is also so protective of his likeness that he won’t licence it out to anyone or anything without his direct approval or involvement.
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