Guns of Tom Cruise Movies: 2013 -

With a new Mission: Impossible film slated for release this year, let's take a look at some of the firearms Cruise has used to blast his way to box office success over the years:

After a few grounded action movies, Cruise moved on to a duo of sci-fi action flicks (the genre is, after all closely linked to his religion). The first was the more cerebral Oblivion that largely consists of Cruise as Jack Harper on screen alone or with co-star Olga Kurylenko as Julia in a bleak 2077 where Earth is mostly a post-apocalyptic desert after a war with an alien race 60 years earlier.

Jack and Julia believe they are part of the “clean-up crew” that keeps automated machinery running to harvest the planet’s few existing resources while fending off aa small remnant of the invading alien force living on Earth. With only a couple weeks left in his tour of duty, Jack makes a discover that forces him to question everything about what he believes to be the truth.

Since it’s set in the near future, the filmmakers were free to take some liberties, and they came up with something pretty cool for Jack’s main weapon.

Jack's futuristic rifle is actually a dressed up Bushmaster ACR. A shell was attached to the rifle that surrounds the stock and upper receiver to make it appear more one-piece and modular. The rifle is always loaded with a short, 10-round PMag for more futuristic lines. Inside the shell, above the barrel is an integrated Overhead/TorchLAB weaponlight and the rifle is topped with a prop optic with digital zoom and rangefinder capabilities that Jack often uses as a monocular. And that whole "grab the gun by the magwell" philosophy he has espoused in other movies—yeah, he's really into it in Oblivion with this rifle.

Jack carried the rifle on a custom white Magpul MS-3 sling to keep with the color-scheme of the rest of his gear and uniform. The sling allows him to transition the rifle from ready to on-the-back carry by sliding it around his torso.

Jack also carries a custom pistol in a kydex drop-leg holster at almost all times. According to imfdb.org, the pistol is a 3D printed prop made for the movie with an angled grip and a bore axis so low it almost looks like a Taser than a pistol.

Cruise followed up Oblivion the next year with a movie that was mostly a box office dud, but got a second life when it was release on disc and VOD, leading many to say it suffered from poor marketing and a less than descriptive title. The studio must have realized this, because at the beginning of it's video release, the title was changed from Edge of Tomorrow to Live Die Repeat.

Either way, it’s a cool movie that sort of takes the premise of Groundhog’s Day, in which the character relives the same day over and over—only this time, it’s the worst day imaginable in which Major William Cage (Cruise) keeps reliving the day in which he’s rushed to the front lines of a war with a vicious alien race and dropped into an infantry battalion.

Troops in the near-future film wear “Combat Jackets”, which are mechanized suits that give them some armor and enhanced strength, speed, agility, and a host of on-board weapons.

What appears to be a FN SCAR-H rifle is one of the more notable weapons mounted on Cage’s jacket. He’s later seen removing it when the jacket runs out of power and uses it as a regular infantry weapon. It’s referenced as using 5.56mm ammunition in the movie, but from the magazine, you can see it’s a 7.62 x 51mm SCAR-H.

When the gun is mounted on the jacket, you can see the grip and trigger assembly are either missing or covered, but they are present when Cage removes the weapon to use hand held.

When confronted by some of the alien Alphas in what he thought was the nest, Cage is seen using a 1911 with a barrel-mounted compensator that looks strikingly like one of the custom pistols used by Thomas Jane in The Punisher (2004).

In the big finale fight, Cage is seen using what appears to be a Benelli Supernova shotgun given to him by Rita. As is common in movies, Cage racks the slide when he first picks up the shotgun, but for once, a shell is actually ejected when he does so.

In 2015, Cruise got away from sci-fi action and got back to a spy thriller with yet another installment in the MI series, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, which brings back the "new" cast of characters: Benji (Pegg), William Brandt( Jeremy Renner) along with Isla Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) plus Hunt (Cruise) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) who is the only character other than Hunt to appear in every MI film, at least for a cameo.

When IMF is shut down by the government because of its suspected bombing of the Kremlin, Hunt and his team must go rogue (get it) to clear their names.

Again, there are a few guns here, but Hunt is mostly an acrobatics and sneaking kind of spy, trying to one-up his glass-wall climb from Ghost Protocol with another stunt that will give anyone afraid of heights a panic attack involving hanging onto the outside of a cargo plane while it takes off—not to mention some death defying leaps across a series of theater catwalks.

The bad guys in the movie all have the same pistol, a SIG-Sauer P226R, usually fitted with a suppressor and a red dot sight. Hunt briefly uses one of the pistols fitted with a suppressor in the restaurant scene and trades it back and forth with Ilsa.

When the need came up to have Hunt and Brandt wield some super-spy type tranquilizer guns, the filmmakers went to a real, though unusual looking gun as a stand-in. The duo actually use Walther SSP .22LR target pistols to subdue the Prime Minister (Tom Hollander) and Attlee (Simon McBurney) in London.

The SSP is made in Germany by the target competition arm of the gunmaker, Walther Sportwaffen. The gun was made in response to ISSF rule changes in the 25 meter Rapid Fire Pistol event in 2005 which effectively rendered the Walther OSP obsolete, since wrap-around grips, light trigger pulls, and the use of .22 Short ammo was prohibited.

The other gun used by Hunt in the movie is unorthodox to say the least. During the attempted performance assassination in Vienna, various Syndicate members are armed with covert sniper rifles.

One, which Hunt captures and uses after fighting off the assassin who brought it, is made from an alto flute, which looks just like a brass instrument when disassembled in its case.

The other hidden guns include Ilsa’s, which is tucked away in a piece of handrail—as well as an assassin disguised as a police officer creating a rifle from his side-handle baton and the frame of his sidearm.

The following year saw Cruise return in another sequel, this time a new JR movie called Jack Reacher: Never Go Back which is an adaptation of the Lee Child book of a similar title.

Cruise reprises his role as the nomadic Reacher, who returns to the world of the military when he discovers that the MP commander who replaced him and whom he’d built a long-distance relationship with, has been charged with a serious crime.

In a classic “sneak up on the guys in a car who think they’re watching you” bit, Reacher smashes the driver’s side window of the surveilling car, knocks the dude out, takes his Smith & Wesson M&P and holds it on the passenger while saying cool stuff.

Surprisingly, for one of the country's most popular handguns among civilians and law enforcement, the M&P hasn't gotten a lot of screen time, racking up less than 20 credits since 2008, though it saw some heavy use in the 2012 remake of Total Recall.

Reacher also uses a a SIG-Sauer P226 E2 in a few scenes, but he doesn’t have a primary firearm, just as in the previous movie.

Later in the film, Reacher uses a customized AR rifle of some kind that he picks up from a downed operative. It looks to have a holographic sight, vertical foregrip a quad-rail with flip-up iron sights and possibly a Magpul stock and PMag magazine.

That pretty much brings us up to date. As for the future, the 54-year-old actor isn’t planning to slow down.