Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise & Will Smith Were Once Locked In A Box Office Showdown—Here’s Who Ultimately Won!

There was a time when three of Hollywood’s biggest titans were locked in a quiet, high-stakes race – not for awards, not for roles, but for pure box office bragging rights. Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, and Will Smith once battled it out for a record that said one thing loud and clear: unstoppable hitmaker.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, all three stars were at the top of their game. Tom Hanks had gone from Splash to Big to back-to-back Oscar wins for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. Cruise was riding high with Top Gun, Rain Man, and the launch of Mission: Impossible. Meanwhile, Smith jumped from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to alien-punching box office gold in Independence Day and Men in Black. Each of them was printing hits like clockwork.

That’s when the box office record came into play – most consecutive movies earning over $100 million domestically. For a while, it was a three-way tie. Hanks, Cruise, and Smith had streaks of smash after smash, with no flops in sight. Even their “smaller” films, like Road to Perdition, Vanilla Sky, and The Pursuit of Happyness, still cleared that coveted nine-figure mark.

But in 2008, the tiebreaker dropped. Will Smith starred in Hancock, and it raked in another $100 million-plus haul, pushing him ahead. With that, he edged out Hanks and Cruise and took the solo lead in this particular box office race. According to The Richest, Smith remained just behind Samuel L. Jackson in a total of $100M hits, but he stood alone at the top among these three A-listers.

The win made sense. At that point, Smith had mastered the blockbuster formula – charm, action, a little humor, and just enough heart. He owned the Fourth of July box office if he was on a poster, tickets sold.

That didn’t mean Hanks or Cruise fell off, far from it. Hanks kept stacking classics like Catch Me If You Can and The Da Vinci Code. Tom Cruise pushed forward with the Mission: Impossible series, keeping the adrenaline alive well into the 2010s.

And all three stayed relevant. By 2019, Hanks had Toy Story 4, Cruise had Mission: Impossible – Fallout and Smith had Aladdin – all global box office monsters. They just weren’t all chasing the same title anymore.

At one point, three legends shared a quiet rivalry that fans barely noticed, but the box office scoreboard kept the receipts. Smith walked away with the win. Cruise kept running, literally and figuratively. Hanks just kept making classics.

A showdown for the books – no punches, no headlines, just numbers. And in that specific streak? The crown went to Will Smith.

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