Tom Cruise is known for many things, such as the Mission Impossible series of spy movies, the Top Gun movies, and his role in A Few Good Men. War of the Worlds, which had a lot of special effects and was a big hit in 2005, fell off the radar soon after it came out. FlixPatrol, a website that keeps track of streaming services, shows that the movie is coming back on HBO Max.
The movie just came out on HBO Max in February, so it suddenly jumped to seventh place on the site’s US rankings. The film stopped being on Netflix in August 2022, so no one in the United States could watch it on any paid streaming service for six months. The Tom Cruise movie came out on Netflix in May 2022, but it saw a similar rise in popularity when it did. This shows that it’s good for films to move around streaming platforms.
The movie is based on H. G. Wells’s book of the same name, which came out in 1898. The book is about aliens using tall, three-legged war machines to invade Earth. The movie’s plot is mostly the same as the book’s, but it takes place in the present day, and the humans try to fight the aliens with modern technology instead of artillery from the late 1800s. Ray Ferrier, a character played by Tom Cruise, shows how violent and pointless the fight is.
Before Tom Cruise starred in the 2005 version of War of the Worlds, the story had been remade several times. This includes a movie from 1953 and several direct-to-video movies that came out in 2005 to cash in on Tom Cruise’s movies. The most famous version was the 1938 radio drama by Orson Welles. Some people thought they were listening to a news report instead of a story made up by Welles, which caused panic in some places.
When it came out, Tom Cruise’s version of War of the Worlds was well-liked. It made more than $600 million on a budget of $132 million and got primarily positive, if not enthusiastic, reviews. People didn’t like parts of the movie’s plot, like the ending, which was unexpectedly happy and didn’t make sense. Part of this comes from the original book’s plot, but the fact that everyone Ray Ferrier cares about comes out of the apocalyptic war unscathed was almost enough to pull viewers out of the story.
After the movie was over and out of theatres, it almost fell out of people’s minds. Tom Cruise played the lead role in Mission: Impossible III the following year. Since then, he has been in many more well-known movies, such as Tropic Thunder and Edge of Tomorrow.