The movie Tom Cruise will always regret: “I’ll never want to do a picture like that again”

 Tom Cruise’s cinematic achievements are vast and far-reaching. The actor has been honoured with an Honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, won three Golden Globes, and earned four Academy Award nominations. Quite simply, Cruise is a powerhouse in the film industry.

Since the 1980s, we’ve seen the New York-born movie icon star in wide-ranging roles in films such as Top Gun, The Colour of Money, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Vanilla Sky and Minority Report. There’s seemingly no end to Cruise’s talents, whether as a character actor or an action hero, faroutmagazine.co.uk.

However, for every few great movies that Cruise has performed in, there are bound to be one or two that he wished he’d never agreed to, and the actor once admitted that one of his films from 1985, a Ridley Scott-directed adventure, belongs firmly in the latter category.

Scott had enjoyed widespread success with 1979’s Alien and 1982’s Blade Runner, but he seems to have got it all wrong in the eyes of Cruise with his epic dark fantasy action Legend, in which Cruise stars alongside Mia Sara, Tim Curry, David Bennent and Alice Playten, among several others.

It tells of a ‘pure being’ called Jack (played by Cruise), who is tasked with stopping the plans of the Lord of Darkness in bringing eternal night to the world. There are all manner of fantasy tropes in Legend, including goblins, unicorn horns, princesses, deep forests and whatever else Scott could throw in.

But Cruise harbours deep regrets over being involved in the film. One of the reasons is the way the movie was marketed, which seems to have upset the actor, who told Rolling Stone, “First of all, the press kind of took that and blew it out of proportion. It’s a movie-movie.”

Sure, marketing is one thing, but another is film production itself. Cruise spent a whole year in London playing the good guy Jack of the Green but delivered a performance utterly lacking in anything remotely resembling emotional nuance, the kind of which we know he is capable.

Cruise simply stated, “I’ll never want to do another picture like that again.”

So, why did Tom Cruise hate Legend?

Cruise’s dissatisfaction with Legend stems primarily from his disappointment with how the final film turned out after Ridley Scott made drastic cuts to the original version. The movie was originally shot as an epic fantasy tale with a runtime of over two hours, but Scott and the studio trimmed it down significantly—reducing character development and some of the deeper narrative elements in favour of a snappier pace.

Cruise reportedly felt that these cuts weakened the story and diminished the emotional weight of Jack’s journey, turning what could have been a more substantial fantasy epic into a visually dazzling but narratively thin film. He believed that Legend had the potential to be something much greater, and the compromises made during editing were, in his view, a disservice to the film’s ambitious scope and the performances of its cast.

Critics agreed, too, and reviews were not too kind for Scott’s 1985 effort, although its cinematography was admired, and it later became something of a cult classic. One of the worst things for Cruise, though, was that he seemed to enjoy being on set while being unable to see what the final product was going to be.

“It’s stunning and gorgeous and poetic, and most of the time, I would be looking at a piece of black tape and having to imagine all of it,” he said. Clearly, the overall experience was not one to remember for Cruise.

Ultimately, Legend is flawed but remains a fascinating piece of fantasy cinema that showcases Ridley Scott’s visual mastery and Tim Curry’s unforgettable villainy. While Cruise’s dissatisfaction with the final product is understandable, given its compromised narrative, the film has nonetheless endured as a cult classic. For fans of dark, visually driven fantasy, Legend remains a unique and captivating journey into an enchanted world of light and darkness.