The internet ruined Tom Cruise for everyone

Tom Cruise eschewed the limelight as his stock seemed to peak after Top Gun. As Hollywood’s other young men formed brat packs and pussy patrols, Cruise controlled his image carefully, choosing projects that paired him with greats such as Paul Newman in a quest to become the world’s last real movie star. In a lengthy consideration of Cruise’s career, LA Weekly says it almost worked: Tom Cruise was the last movie star, but he was destroyed by the changing face of internet journalism and rise of gossip blogs. The publication says his mask started to slip as he stood on Oprah’s couch — an infamous image Cruise’s publicists couldn’t stop from spreading in manipulated form across the new face of the internet in 2005 — and ended with Cruise settling for typecast action hero roles, “convinced of his own premature demise.”