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Home > Films > C > Cocktail

Tuesday April 30th 2024

Cocktail | 1988

• Locations |
• New York City ;
• Toronto , Ontario ;
• Roger Donaldson
• Tom Cruise,
• Bryan Brown,
• Elizabeth Shue,
• Lisa Banes,
• Laurence Luckinbill,
• Gina Gershon

For a brief period in 1988, it began to feel like synchronised bartending was the coolest career option available thanks to Roger Donaldson ’s cautionary tale of choosing ambition over love.

Brian Flanagan ( Tom Cruise ), fresh out of the army, arrives in New York , via the inevitable Greyhound bus, with dreams of overnight riches.

There's not an auspicious start as he takes the subway to Vernon-Jackson Station in Queens to hook up with his only contact in the city, Uncle Pat who runs a local Irish pub in Long Island City .

‘Pat’s Place’ was a bar which stood at 10-37 Jackson Avenue on the corner of 50th Avenue. It's now unrecognisable – apart from the distinctive shape – after being spruced up as the hip Jackson's Eatery / Bar .

Despite Pat’s attempt to bring Brian down to earth, the aspiring tycoon has his sights firmly set on a career in Wall Street, or Madison Avenue, or ‘communications’…

He quickly discovers that he’s not remotely experienced enough to step straight into a high-end position and reluctantly settles for tending bar at night while studying during the day.

It’s more Brian’s charm and popularity with female customers than innate ability that get him a job from cynical Aussie Doug Coughlin ( Bryan Brown ) at the old TGI Friday bar on the East Side .

This stood at 1152 First Avenue at 63rd Street but the candy-striped awnings are long-gone and the premises now houses the Sherlock Holmes-themed Baker Street Pub .

For reasons of economy, the production was based in Toronto and the interior of the popular hangout was recreated in the studio here.

In Ontario too is ‘City College’ where Brian enrolls for a business course, which is Knox College at the University of Toronto .

Coughlin and Flanagan’s bottle juggling routine proves a great hit, oddly taking precedence over speedy service, and the pair are hired to tend bar at “the hottest saloon in town”.

The ‘town’, once again, is Toronto , where 'Cell Block', the blue-lit circular bar in which Brian flagrantly contravenes all manner of health and safety regulations by standing on the bar top to recite poetry, is the Rotunda of the Old Don Jail, 550 Gerrard Street East .

The Don Jail , east of the Don River in Toronto 's Riverdale neighbourhood, was built in 1864 as the Toronto Jail, with a capacity of 184 inmates. Before capital punishment was abolished in Canada , Toronto Jail was the site of twenty-six hangings, the last being as recently as 1962.

The Jail was renovated to serve as the administrative wing of Bridgepoint Active Healthcare in 2013, and its Rotunda is open to visitors.

Doug and Brian’s ambitious plans to open their own ‘Cocktails and Dreams’ establishment come to grief after a fist-swinging falling-out over the flirtatious and rich Coral ( Gina Gershon ).

Giving up on the dull business course, Brian heads to the West Indies for an apparently lucrative gig running a beach bar in Jamaica . The was the Dragon Beach Bar, Dragon Beach in Port Antonio , which went on to find fame under the name of, yes, the Cruise Bar. Sadly, it’s since closed.

You can still enjoy Dragon Beach itself and, a few miles east, you can visit Reach Falls , on the Drivers River , which is where Brian frolics with holidaying New Yorker Jordan Mooney ( Elizabeth Shue ).

In 2010, Tom Cruise returned to Port Antonio for the tropical island scene in Knight And Day , and you can see more of the town in the final Daniel Craig Bond movie, No Time To Die .

If you want to boogie the night away in the reggae-filled ‘Dance Cave’, well, that’s back in Toronto . This 'tropical' hideaway was filmed inside Lee’s Palace , 529 Bloor Street West .

Lee’s is also the rock venue where Sex Bob-omb perform in Edgar Wright ’s 2010 adaptation of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World .

A bad bet with Doug, who’s turned up on honeymoon with his wealthy new bride, leads Brian to enjoy a fling with the older – but rich, Bonnie ( Lisa Banes ).

Jordan, understandably humiliated, is on the first plane home, back to her job in a ‘New York’ diner.

Well, sort of. ‘Jerry’s Deli’, where she waits tables – and later gets to dump the day’s specials onto the contrite Brian, is the famous Lakeview Restaurant , 1132 Dundas Street West , Toronto .

This 24-hour eaterie dates back to 1932 and its period deco interior has appeared in Troy Duffy 's 1999 The Boondock Saints , the 2007 musical Hairspray , David Cronenberg 's 2012 Cosmopolis , with Robert Pattinson , and famously became 'Dixie Doug's', the faux-Southern pie restaurant in Guillermo Del Toro ’s Oscar-winning The Shape of Water .

Brian, now living with Bonnie back in New York , realises the terrible mistake he’s made. It’s outside a gallery alongside the old Regency Theatre, which stood at 1987 Broadway at West 68th Street in New York , that he drunkenly breaks up with her.

The Regency, which seems to be showing Casablanca , was indeed a rep house showing classic films. It closed in 1999 and the whole block has been rebuilt.

Jordan is in no mood to take Brian back but, after a wise word from Uncle Pat, he storms off to her family’s luxury apartment on – where else? – 'Park Avenue'.

That expansive lobby, where Brian has to get past the doorman, is actually that of the Canada Life Building, 330 University Avenue at Queen Street, in Toronto ’s Downtown core.

Once he gets up to the penthouse to confront Jordan’s father ( Laurence Luckinbill ), who tries to pay him off with a $10,000 cheque, the elegant blue and white living room is Lady Pellatt’s Suite in Casa Loma , 1 Austin Terrace at Spadina Road, on a bluff overlooking northern Toronto . The Suite has had a slightly warmer makeover than its clinical pale blue-and-white colour scheme in the film.

The mock-Gothic folly of Casa Loma has proved a real boon to the city’s film industry, featuring in countless productions, most famously as Professor Xavier’s Academy in Bryan Singer ’s first X-Men movie, but also in Scott Pilgrim Vs The World (again), David Cronenberg 's Dead Ringers , Keanu Reeves sci-fi Johnny Mnemonic , and Oscar-winning musical Chicago .

‘Hysteria’, the smart floating nightclub now run by Doug, is The Water Club , in a barge moored on the East River at East 30th Street , in New York 's Murray Hill .

Unless you want to hire the club, you've missed your chance for a romantic meal here. From 1982 to 2018, The Water Club operated as a restaurant but it's now used exclusively as a venue for private events.

Things are not going as well as they appear on the surface, and Brian finds himself hit by a dose of reality when he has to attend a funeral, held in St John’s Norway Cemetery , 256 Kingston Road at Woodbine Avenue, in Toronto . Picturesque and conveniently close to film studios, the cemetery has also been seen in Gus Van Sant 's 1995 To Die For , John Singleton 's Four Brothers , and Jim Sheridan 's Get Rich or Die Tryin' .

Visit The Film Locations

Flights: John F Kennedy International Airport , New York, NY 11430 ( tel: 718.244.4444 )

Visit: New York

Travel around: MTA

Visit: the Baker Street Pub , 1152 1st Avenue, New York, NY 10065 ( tel: 212.688.9663 )

Ontario | Toronto

Visit: Ontario

Visit: Toronto

Flights: Toronto Pearson International Airport , 6301 Silver Dart Drive, Mississauga, ON L5P 1B2 ( tel: 416.247.7678 )

Rail: Union Station

Getting around: Toronto Transit Commission (bus, subway, streetcar and paratransit)

Getting around: GO Transit (bus, train)

Visit: Lee’s Palace , 529 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1Y5 ( tel: 416.532.1598 )

Visit: Casa Loma , 1 Austin Terrace, Toronto, ON M5R 1X8 ( tel: 416.923.1171 )

Visit: Jamaica

VISIT: Port Antonio

From 1988: How Tom Cruise learned to be a flashy bartender

Actor interviewed dozens of pros to learn the craft of tending bar for cocktail.

Tom Cruise on his research for Cocktail

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Thirty years ago, Tom Cruise was already a bona fide movie star.

He'd already been seen on the big screen in The Outsiders , Risky Busines s, Top Gun and The Color of Money .

Broken bottles, fearful onlookers

"When I started out, I interviewed about 35 bartenders," said Cruise, explaining that he needed to be able to convincingly play a flashy, high-end bartender (which might be called a mixologist today).

Cruise said Cocktail  needed to be able to convince the audience that his co-star Bryan Brown was "the best bartender they've ever seen" and that Cruise's own character could then develop into a "star bartender" in his own right.

The mega-star admitted to breaking five bottles when filming and to losing a bet in the process. Brown broke only four, which left Cruise a bottle short of victory.

"Well, that's not bad because that's hard to do," Midday co-host Valerie Pringle told him.

"I was surprised. I thought I was going to break many more than that," Cruise said. "The people that were in front of me, though, were a little nervous when we were flipping the bottles."

Movie Reviews

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"Cocktail" tells the story of two bartenders and their adventures in six bars and several bedrooms. What is remarkable, given the subject, is how little the movie knows about bars or drinking.

Early in the film, there's a scene where the two bartenders stage an elaborately choreographed act behind the bar. They juggle bottles in unison, one spins ice cubes into the air and the other one catches them, and then they flip bottles at each other like a couple of circus jugglers. All of this is done to rock 'n' roll music, and it takes them about four minutes to make two drinks. They get a roaring ovation from the customers in their crowded bar, which is a tip-off to the movie's glossy phoniness. This isn't bartending, it's a music video, and real drinkers wouldn't applaud, they'd shout: "Shut up and pour!" The bartenders in the film are played by Tom Cruise , as a young ex-serviceman who dreams of becoming a millionaire, and Bryan Brown , as a hard-bitten veteran who has lots of cynical advice. Brown advises Cruise to keep his eyes open for a "rich chick," because that's his ticket to someday opening his own bar. Cruise is ready for this advice.

He studies self-help books and believes that he'll be rich someday, if only he gets that big break. The movie is supposed to be about how he outgrows his materialism, although the closing scenes leave room for enormous doubts about his redemption.

The first part of the movie works the best. That's when Cruise drops out of school, becomes a full-time bartender, makes Brown his best friend and learns to juggle those bottles. In the real world, Cruise and Brown would be fired for their time-wasting grandstanding behind the bar, but in this movie they get hired to work in a fancy disco where they have a fight over a girl and Cruise heads for Jamaica.

There, as elsewhere, his twinkling eyes and friendly smile seem irresistible to the women on the other side of the bar, and he lives in a world of one-night stands. That's made possible by the fact that no one in this movie has ever heard of AIDS, not even the rich female fashion executive ( Lisa Banes ) who picks Cruise up and takes him back to Manhattan with her.

What do you think? Do you believe a millionaire Manhattan woman executive in her 30s would sleep with a wildly promiscuous bartender she picks up on the beach? Not unless she was seriously drunk. And that's another area this movie knows little about: the actual effects of drinking. Sure, Cruise gets tanked a couple of times and staggers around a little and throws a few punches. But given the premise that he and Brown drink all of the time, shouldn't they be drunk, or hung over, at least most of the time? Not in this fantasy world.

If the film had stuck to the relationship between Cruise and Brown, it might have had a chance. It makes a crucial error when it introduces a love story, involving Cruise and Elisabeth Shue , as a vacationing waitress from New York. They find true love, which is shattered when Shue sees Cruise with the rich Manhattan executive.

After the executive takes Cruise back to New York and tries to turn him into a pampered stud, he realizes his mistake and apologizes to Shue, only to discover, of course, that she is pregnant - and rich.

The last stages of the movie were written, directed and acted on automatic pilot, as Shue's millionaire daddy tries to throw Cruise out of the penthouse but love triumphs. There is not a moment in the movie's last half-hour that is not borrowed from other movies, and eventually even the talented and graceful Cruise can be seen laboring with the ungainly reversals in the script. Shue, who does whatever is possible with her role, is handicaped because her character is denied the freedom to make natural choices; at every moment, her actions are dictated by the artificial demands of the plot.

It's a shame the filmmakers didn't take a longer, harder look at this material. The movie's most interesting character is the older bartender, superbly played by Brown, who never has a false moment. If the film had been told from his point of view, it would have been a lot more interesting, but box-office considerations no doubt required the center of gravity to shift to Cruise and Shue.

One of the weirdest things about "Cocktail"' is the so-called message it thinks it contains. Cruise is painted throughout the film as a cynical, success-oriented 1980s materialist who wants only to meet a rich woman and own his own bar. That's why Shue doesn't tell him at first that she's rich. Toward the end of the movie, there's a scene where he allegedly chooses love over money, but then, a few months later, he is the owner and operator of his own slick Manhattan singles bar.

How did he finance it? There's a throwaway line about how he got some money from his uncle, a subsistence-level bartender who can't even afford a late-model car. Sure. It costs a fortune to open a slick singles bar in Manhattan, and so we are left with the assumption that Cruise's rich father-in-law came through with the financing. If the movie didn't want to leave that impression, it shouldn't have ended with the scene in the bar. But then this is the kind of movie that uses Cruise's materialism as a target all through the story and then rewards him for it at the end. The more you think about what really happens in "Cocktail," the more you realize how empty and fabricated it really is.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

Cocktail (1988)

100 minutes

Laurence Luckinbill as Mr. Mooney

Tom Cruise as Brian Flanagan

Lisa Banes as Bonnie

Elisabeth Shue as Jordan Mooney

Bryan Brown as Doug Coughlin

Produced by

• Robert W. Cort

Directed by

• Roger Donaldson

Screenplay by

• Heywood Gould

Photographed by

• Dean Semler
• Neil Travis
• J. Peter Robinson

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Touchstone and Beyond: A History of Disney’s “Cocktail”

Summer is just around the corner, and long weekends are soon knocking on everyone’s door. With states reopening, and businesses about to come back into full swing, let’s take some time and meet up at a fictional bar to celebrate.

This week ‘Touchstone and Beyond’ looks back at a film that showed us what a bartender was willing to do for success, and how the price of success would cost him everything he cared about. Let’s shake it up for Tom Cruise’s second Touchstone Pictures film, Cocktail .

Brian (Tom Cruise) is looking to make it big in business and moves to New York after his army service ends. Though he hustles from one interview to the next, Brian can’t get a job anywhere, until he meets Doug (Bryan Brown). Hired on the spot to bartend, Brian is an instant success. He is enamored with being so popular at night but struggling with his city college classes during the day.

Fame is instant for Brian and Doug. Their flair bartending style brings a relationship for Brian with a photographer named Coral (Gina Gershon) but fame can be fleeting. His friendship with Doug sours and Brian leaves for Jamaica to bartend at a resort. Over two years later, Brian is content on the sunny shores of Jamaica where he has used his talents to build up his reputation at the resort. He meets Jordan (Elisabeth Shue), a guest at the hotel, and a relationship blossoms. When Doug arrives and reunites with Brian, he introduces his very rich wife Kerry (Kelly Lynch) and informs Brian about his plan to open a trendy club back in New York.

Old habits die hard for Brian. He is goaded into a fling with a rich hotel guest by Doug, which ends his relationship with Jordan. She leaves for New York never saying goodbye, while Brian is trying to pick up the pieces of what to do next. Brian eventually leaves Jamaica too with big dreams of success, but they crumble. After searching up Jordan, Brian learns that she is pregnant with his child.

Doug is on the cusp of success but it’s an illusion. Brian learns that Doug is in debt, and despondent over the future. His suicide inspires Brian to try again to reunite with Jordan. After professing his love, Jordan takes him back and Brian seems to be on the right track. Several months down the road, Brian and Jordan are married. He has started his own bar named Flanagan’s Cocktails & Dreams and at the opening night of the bar, Brian is surprised once more to learn that Jordan is pregnant with twins.

Cinematic Compliments

Tom Cruise is at his best in the role of Brian Flanagan. He is likeable and charming which helps the viewers forget the negative character traits of Brian. He’s shallow and self-centered, but Tom Cruise paints a shiny glow over these negative attributes which allows the viewer to root for the protagonist.

Elisabeth Shue is truly excellent as Jordan. She brings an individualism to the role that puts her on an even level with Cruise’s Brian. Not just a throwaway character, Jordan makes Brian own up to his faults, and she has all the power that will influence Brian’s future. Tom Cruise and Elisabeth Shue are a perfect match and complement each other well on screen.

Cinematic Complaints

The suicide of Bryan Brown’s Doug character came out of nowhere and was unnecessarily bloody. Doug was melodramatic but the brutality of his suicide doesn’t match up with the characters arc. It felt unnecessary to kill Doug. It would have been better to see Brian walk away from Doug because he was tired of his antics, and not because he was dead.  

If the idea of watching a cocky bartender scheming for success doesn’t appeal to you then Cocktail  is a film to skip.

Fun Film Facts

• Fans of Beverly Hills 90210 will recognize James Eckhouse as one of the patrons at the Jamaica bar.
• Though the movie takes place in New York, most of the film was shot in Toronto.
• Recently, a camera operator from the film revealed that while shooting a helicopter scene for the film, Elisabeth Shue almost walked into the rotor blade of the helicopter. Cruise noticed the imminent peril and lunged at her, saving her life.
• Andrew Shue has a brief role as a wedding guest.
• The film is based on the book of the same name by author Heywood Gould.
• Gould would also adapt the book by writing the screenplay for the film.
• Heywood Gould is reportedly not happy with how the film turned out. Apparently, there are over forty different drafts of the screenplay.
• Bryan Brown once talked about how the original script was the best that he ever read. It focused on the cult of celebrity and was a very dark picture. When Cruise signed on the tone of the script changed to turn the project into a lighter more upbeat film.
• Bryan Brown also had nothing but positive remarks about working with Tom Cruise.
• Charlie Sheen, Robin Williams, and Jim Carrey were all up for the part of Brian.
• The studio originally thought about casting Paul Newman in the role of Doug. Studio executives thought they could recreate the magic established between Cruise and Newman on The Color of Money .
• There is a bar named Cocktails & Dreams, after Brian’s bar on the Gold Coast in Australia.
• Tom Hanks was in contention for the role of Brian but turned it down for Big .
• Former Disney Studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg originally changed the name of the film to  The Bartender but changed it back to Cocktail  before the premiere.
• Kelly Lynch claimed the film was heavily edited which resulted in much of her storyline being cut from the film.

The Golden Popcorn Bucket Rating

Cocktail  gets a 2 Golden Popcorn Bucket  rating. It’s a shallow film that’s fun to watch, and easily forgettable.

Coming Attractions

The bar hop continues next week when we visit another famous establishment that offers talented and unique bartenders, Coyote Ugly .

Production Credits

Directed by Roger Donaldson

Produced by Touchstone Pictures / Silver Screen Partners III

• Tom Cruise as Brian
• Bryan Brown as Doug
• Elisabeth Shue as Jordan
• Gina Gershon as Coral
• Kelly Lynch as Kerry

Release Date:  July 29, 1988

Budget: $20 million

Box Office Gross

Domestic: $78,222,753

Worldwide Total:  $171,504,781

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Review/Film; Mixing and Matching In the Singles-Bar Life

By Vincent Canby

• July 29, 1988

''Cocktail'' is an upscale, utterly brainless variation on those efficient old B-movies of the 1930's and 40's about the lives, loves and skills of coal miners, sand hogs and telephone linemen, among others.

Whatever the risky job, it never paid enough, but these were rugged guys. They worked hard, played hard, fought frequently and didn't talk too good, but they were the salt of the earth. In such men-at-work movies, women were treated with the respect due the weaker sex.

As movie language has become rougher over the years, the jobs have become more effete and the characters, though somewhat better educated, more seriously dim.

Take Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise), the young, on-the-make hero of ''Cocktail,'' which treats the profession of bartending with a lot of the same narrow-focused intensity and none of the intelligence that Howard Hawks brought to tuna-fishing in ''Tiger Shark.''

Just out of the Army, Brian crosses the East River from Queens to Manhattan with the fond expectation of becoming a Wall Street wheeler-dealer or, at least, an ad agency whiz. Brian, an exceptionally good-looking kid, has a breezy, ingratiating manner and a good wardrobe but no university degrees.

Astonished and depressed when he strikes out, Brian takes a job as a bartender in an East Side singles bar. At first, he is all thumbs. He doesn't know a daiquiri from a John Collins. On his first night, the drink orders pile up. Waitresses show marked distress. Customers are rude. Brian is ready to quit when he's taken under the wing of Doug Coughlin (Bryan Brown), a cynical, philosophical veteran who knows all about bartending, women and life.

In no time flat, Brian is mixing four drinks at once, tossing ice cubes into the air and catching them in a glass held behind his back, trading double-entendres with the waitresses and addresses with beautiful patrons at barside.

Brian tries to continue his education during the day, but career pressures become too great. He realizes he has found his true calling. He is that rare pheonomeon, a natural bartender: part-performer, part-therapist, part-gigolo. With the help of Coughlin, Brian becomes a star, sought after by women and the owners of other bars. Soon he and Brian are making plans for their own place, to be called Cocktails and Dreams.

''Cocktail,'' which opens today at the Cinema 2 and other theaters, is ''Saturday Night Fever'' without John Travolta, the Bee-Gees and dancing. It is an inane romantic drama that only a very young, very naive bartender could love. How it got that way is difficult to understand.

It was directed by Roger Donaldson, the Australian who made ''Smash Palace'' (in New Zealand) and last year's stylish hit ''No Way Out.'' It was adapted by Heywood Gould (''Fort Apache: The Bronx,'' ''The Boys From Brazil'') from his own ironic, obscenely funny 1984 novel, which the screenplay resembles not at all. In this case, the screenplay has the sort of dopey fatuousness usually found in a so-called novelization of a second-rate screenplay.

The Brian Flanagan in Mr. Gould's first-person novel is tough and self-aware, a young man who loathes much of what he does but who is also too weak and too much of an amused observer to change course easily. Between novel and screenplay, Mr. Gould seems to have been brainwashed. He now accepts Brian and his scene without criticism or comment, at face value. ''Cocktail,'' the movie, celebrates the sleazy life that the novel originally satirized.

Mr. Cruise, who was fine as Paul Newman's cocky co-star in ''The Color of Money,'' doesn't act the role of Brian Flanagan, and maybe no one could. He visits it with a certain amount of good humor, bringing with him a lot of the boyish mannerisms and tics he seems to have picked up from Mr. Newman. Mr. Brown is no better in a role that is similarly disadvantaged. He has charm as an actor, but this wasn't enough to stifle the derisive laughter I heard during a crucial scene at the preview I attended.

The women in the film, mindless props to be used by the comradely males, include Elisabeth Shue, as a ''good'' girl, and Lisa Banes as a predator.

If, by chance, you find yourself in a theater watching ''Cocktail,'' resist the temptation to walk out before the end. The final scene is the hoot of the year. A Natural Bartender COCKTAIL, directed by Roger Donaldson; screenplay by Heywood Gould, based on his novel; director of photography, Dean Semler; edited by Neil Travis; music by J. Peter Robinson; production designer, Mel Bourne; produced by Ted Field and Robert W. Cort; released by Touchstone Pictures. At Cinema 2, Third Avenue at 60th Street, and other theaters. Running time: 100 minutes. This film is rated R. Brian Flanagan ... Tom Cruise Doug Coughlin ... Bryan Brown Jordan Mooney ... Elisabeth Shue Bonnie ... Lisa Banes Mr. Mooney ... Laurence Luckinbill Kerry Couglin ... Kelly Lynch Coral ... Gina Gershon

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Dragon Bay Beach

Cocktail (1988).

This is the place where Cocktail starring Tom Cruise, Bryan Brown and Elisabeth Shue was filmed at Dragon Bay Beach in Port Antonio, Jamaica. Start scrolling to find out more.

Brian and Jordan are having a great time together.

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LOCATION DETAILS

beach, beach (tropical)

Tom Cruise, Elisabeth Shue

After being discharged from the Army, Brian Flanagan moves back to Queens and takes a job in a bar run by Doug Coughlin, who teaches Brian the fine art of bar-tending. Brian quickly becomes a patron favorite with his flashy drink-mixing style, and Brian adopts his mentor's cynical philosophy on life and goes for the money.

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35 Years After Its Release, the Movie ‘Cocktail’ Shows Us How Far Drinks Culture Has Come

words: Rich Manning

illustration: Danielle Grinberg

In the lead up to the 95th Academy Awards, this week on VinePair we’re celebrating the starring role drinks have played in the most iconic movies in history. Read more about Drinking On Screen here .

“Cocktail” is not a good movie. Critics savaged the Tom Cruise vehicle when it hit theaters in 1988. It “won” Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Movie and Worst Screenplay. Its current Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 58 percent suggests the public perceives the film as a mediocre slice of ‘80s cheese. Most people don’t really need to spend the $3.99 it currently costs to stream the movie. That is, most people.

If you’re in the drinks industry, or if you’re a fan of modern cocktail culture and the bartending industry that makes it possible, “Cocktail” is worth 1 hour and 43 minutes of your time. The movie hasn’t aged too well 35 years after its release, but that’s what makes it interesting. Time has caused “Cocktail” to evolve into a movie that you don’t watch as much as observe if you’re in the know about contemporary mixed drinks. If you simply watch it, it’s terrible. If you observe it, it’s oddly fascinating.

The Duality of ‘Cocktail’

When you stream “Cocktail” and become awash in the glow of its neon opening credits, you’ll naturally observe it through the knowing eyes of the modern bar scene. You already know that the drinks are going to suck and the techniques will be horrific, and they’ll be fun to mock as you sit there with your proper mixed drink made with real ingredients in hand. The movie indeed gives drinks aficionados ample fodder. Cruise’s Brian Flanagan and Bryan Brown’s Doug Coughlin may know how to toss a bottle over their shoulder or slam a Boston shaker onto a bar top in unison, but they don’t know drink specs or use jiggers, fruit juices, or pretty much anything that creates a balanced drink. They free pour every spirit, sometimes three bottles at once. When the movie shifts from New York to Jamaica and Doug asks Brian to make him a Daiquiri after bragging that he taught Brian everything he knows, Brian immediately reaches for a blender instead of a shaker. Granted, they’re in a tropical setting and you can easily predict that he’s going for the blender. But for those who know modern bartenders use the classic Daiquiri recipe as a litmus test of professional skill, this sequence is still cringeworthy, especially since the final result ends up looking like a Mudslide . These things turn the movie into something mildly horrific and slightly comedic, bloated with a bevy of bad beverages.

At some point, though, you’ll remember that “Cocktail” came out in 1988. It may be during the film, or it could be a few hours later when you’re reaching for a snack in the fridge. In some weird way, “Cocktail” provides a window into what the bar scene was like before the work of pioneers like Dale DeGroff, Audrey Saunders, Sasha Petraske, and Julie Reiner helped transform the industry for the better. Cocktail mixers and canned, frozen juices were the weapons of choice behind the stick back then. Craft spirits weren’t a thing, so options were limited at best. In the era’s context, Brian’s goal of franchising a bar chain for suburban shopping malls called Flanagan’s Cocktails and Dreams seems like a legitimate strategy, even if it petrifies our contemporary sensibilities. All of this is enough to make you drop to your knees and thank God and Jerry Thomas that you can enjoy cocktail culture in its present state.

We Need to Talk About Doug

Brian Flanagan is “Cocktail’s” protagonist. Yet Doug Coughlin is the more fascinating character. His jaded cynicism makes him a natural mentor for “young Flanagan,” as he calls Brian throughout the film. He appreciates the good stuff despite his penchant for flair. The last time he and Brian are seen together in the film, they’re working through his bottle of Louis XIII Cognac — a bottle that will set you back at least $3,000 today.

Doug is also problematic. His words of advice — occasionally self-referred throughout the film as “Coughlin’s Laws” — are awful nuggets of anti-wisdom that revolve around misogyny and treating customers like garbage. They sure as hell have nothing to do with making a good drink. Even though “Cocktail” is a work of fiction, it still seems like Petraske’s Rules were needed to cancel out Coughlin’s Laws.

In between his misbegotten mandates, Doug drops some knowledge that initially jumps out as falsehoods if you forget about the film’s context — particularly if you have even passing knowledge of New York City’s bar scene. When Doug says, “This is the Upper East Side, saloon capital of the world,” your brain may start screaming out the names of the critically acclaimed bars in the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.

At the time, however, Doug was spot on. In the ‘80s, the Upper East Side was absolutely the industry’s epicenter, a mélange of establishments that offered the beautiful and the monied ample choices to get their drink and dance on. The scene kept rolling strong through the ‘90s even as the clientele shifted from Wall Street types to the college crowd, thanks in part to gimmicks like cheesy, themed establishments and “ Ladies’ Night s.” Meanwhile, south-of-14th neighborhoods like the East Village and the Lower East Side wouldn’t start gaining acclaim for their bars until places like Angel’s Share and Milk & Honey opened, long after copies of “Cocktail” filled up video rental store shelves. Doug’s lines about the scene may have aged like a long-forgotten bottle of open cream liqueur, but it’s not his fault.

The Business of ‘Cocktail’

There are a few things in “Cocktail” that still hold up today. The beginning of the film showcases the type of money-waving, bar-top-slapping customers who still drive bartenders nuts. Brian’s character arc of a person who fell into the bar scene when other career ambitions fizzled still resonates. Toward the end of the movie, Jordan’s (Elisabeth Shue’s) dad essentially accuses Brian of being a loser because he’s a bartender (i.e., he doesn’t have a “real job”). Such classist viewpoints continue to exist.

The drinks, on the other hand, do not hold up. Most are relics of a time when creamy sweet concoctions with no base spirit and vodka drinks with dirty names dominated the scene. Taste is relative, of course, but if you tend to imbibe in spirit-forward drinks like the Boulevardier or Manhattan , it feels safe to assume that cocktails like the Orgasm, Velvet Hammer, and Friar Tuck will probably be of no interest to you.

There are a few oddities among the cocktails called out in the film. In an odd poem he recites in front of a crowd, Brian references a drink called the “Death Spasm.” One problem: No such drink seems to exist. Googling the drink brings up the Death in the Afternoon cocktail, a potent potable consisting of Champagne and absinthe (or pastis if absinthe isn’t available). It’s possible that Death Spasm was a stand-in for Death in the Afternoon so Brian could use a word that rhymed with orgasm.

Another quirk involves the Angel’s Tit cocktail. Ordering the drink when “Cocktail” came out in 1988 got you a creamy drink consisting of a two-to-one ratio of maraschino liqueur and cream. Ordering it today may get you something better, thanks to an ingenious tweak. Sometime in the 2010s, The Dry Cocktail founder Mikka Kristola updated the recipe when she was bartender at The Varnish in Los Angeles, adjusting the ratios to three-quarters of an ounce each and adding a bar spoon of both Heering Cherry liqueur and Fernet Branca .

Then there’s the Ding-a-Ling, a concoction featuring vodka, peach schnapps, and lemon-lime soda that’s mentioned twice in the film. Searching the drink today will produce images of a radically different beverage. That’s because author Simon Difford created his own cocktail called the Ding-a-Ling in 2022. It features  Del Maguey Vida mezcal , dark rum, Disaronno amaretto, and lemon juice. Judging by the specs, it seems much more interesting than the original.

A Unique Kind of Lasting Legacy

There’s one final observation to be made about “Cocktail” 35 years after its release. It has nothing to do with a crucial scene or a bit of dialogue. It’s an observation that can only be made after the fact. By the time the movie came out, the days of the cocktail bar landscape the movie depicted were already numbered.

In 1987, the year before “Cocktail” came out, DeGroff got behind the stick at the Rainbow Room and kicked off cocktail culture’s ongoing renaissance. It was a slow-growing seed that germinated at a deliberate pace, allowing the Doug Coughlins and Brian Flanagans of the industry a few more years of glory before the 2000s hit. There are still some Dougs and Brians behind the stick today, but they’ve been pushed into a space of far less prominence over the last two decades, thanks to a still-blossoming nationwide network of talented bartenders that give a damn about making a great drink and providing great service to their guests. This, then, may be the main reason why “Cocktail” is an oddly fascinating movie to observe 35 years after its release, even if it is a bad film to watch. It doesn’t necessarily show how bad the bar scene was back in the day as much as it shows how far it’s come.

Published: March 7, 2023

• 35 Years After Its Release, the Movie ‘Cocktail’ Shows Us How Far Drinks Culture Has Come | VinePair
• https://vinepair.com/articles/cocktail-movie-drinks-culture/
• wbs_cat Spirit, cocktail culture, craft cocktails, Movies
• How the Margarita Became My Unofficial Family Cocktail | VinePair
• https://vinepair.com/articles/margarita-unofficial-family-cocktail/
• Maggie Hennessy
• wbs_cat Spirit, wbs_type Tequila, cocktails, margarita, nhb, tequila

Mixing It Up: Exploring the Iconic Cocktails from the Movie “Cocktail”

• developer on September 19, 2023

“Cocktail,” the 1988 romantic drama film directed by Roger Donaldson, is not just a classic of its time; it’s a celebration of mixology and the art of crafting the perfect cocktail. Starring Tom Cruise as the charming bartender Brian Flanagan, the film takes us on a journey through the world of bartending, love, and friendship. Along the way, it introduces us to several iconic cocktails that have since become staples in the world of mixology. In this article, we’ll delve into the delicious details of these cocktails, their history, and how you can recreate them at home.

The Red Eye

Our journey through the world of “Cocktail” begins with the Red Ey e, a simple yet refreshing cocktail. In the movie, Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise) impresses his mentor Doug Coughlin (Bryan Brown) by making this drink for the first time.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 oz. vodka
• 1 oz. tomato juice
• 1 dash of hot sauce
• 1 dash of Worcestershire sauce
• Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

• Fill a shaker with ice.
• Add vodka, tomato juice, hot sauce, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper.
• Shake well.
• Strain into a chilled glass filled with ice.
• Garnish with a lemon wedge and celery stick.

The Red Eye is a classic cocktail, often referred to as a “Bloody Mary Lite.” It’s perfect for those who enjoy the tangy flavors of tomato juice and a hint of spice.

The Woo Woo

Next up is the Woo Woo , a sweet and fruity cocktail that makes an appearance in the film during a beach party scene.

• 1/2 oz. peach schnapps
• 3 oz. cranberry juice
• Add vodka, peach schnapps, and cranberry juice.
• Strain into a chilled glass.
• Garnish with a lime wedge or a cherry.

The Woo Woo is a delightful and easy-to-make cocktail, making it a favorite at parties and gatherings.

The Jamaican Bobsled

The Jamaican Bobsled is another fun and tropical cocktail featured in the movie. It’s a colorful and flavorful drink that reflects the movie’s beachy vibes.

• 1 1/2 oz. white rum
• 1/2 oz. coconut cream
• 1/2 oz. blue curaçao
• 2 oz. pineapple juice
• Crushed ice
• Fill a blender with crushed ice.
• Add white rum, coconut cream, blue curaçao, and pineapple juice.
• Blend until smooth.
• Pour into a chilled glass.
• Garnish with a pineapple slice and a cherry.

The Jamaican Bobsled is a tropical paradise in a glass. Its vibrant blue color and refreshing flavors make it a hit at beach-themed parties.

• The Last Barman Poet

Named after Brian Flanagan’s poetic ambitions in the movie, The Last Barman Poet is a cocktail that represents the artistry and creativity of bartending.

• 1 1/2 oz. light rum
• 1/2 oz. lime juice
• 1/2 oz. simple syrup
• 1/2 oz. pineapple juice
• Lime twist for garnish
• Add light rum, blue curaçao, lime juice, simple syrup, and pineapple juice.
• Shake vigorously.
• Strain into a chilled martini glass.
• Garnish with a lime twist.

The Last Barman Poet is a cocktail that pays homage to the creativity and passion of bartenders. Its bright blue color and balanced flavors make it a true work of art.

The Flaming Dr. Pepper

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Brian Flanagan and Doug Coughlin introduce the audience to the Flaming Dr. Pepper , a daring and fiery cocktail that involves lighting the drink on fire before consuming it.

• 3/4 oz. amaretto liqueur
• 1/4 oz. high-proof rum (overproof)
• 1/2 glass of beer (lager)
• Pour the amaretto into a shot glass.
• Float the high-proof rum on top of the amaretto.
• Fill a beer glass halfway with beer.
• Carefully ignite the amaretto and rum in the shot glass.
• Drop the flaming shot glass into the beer glass.
• Blow out the flame, and drink the cocktail quickly through a straw.

The Flaming Dr. Pepper is not for the faint of heart, but it’s undoubtedly a showstopper at any gathering.

But here is more. Here is a list of cocktails that are either made, mentioned, or play a role in various scenes throughout the film:

• Bloody Mary
• Brandy Alexander
• The Righteous Bison
• Black Russian
• Jamaican Bobsled
• The Frozen Banana Daiquiri
• Planters Punch
• Irish Coffee
• Old-Fashioned
• Vodka Martini
• Amaretto Sour
• Screwdriver
• Tom Collins
• Dry Martini
• Flaming Dr. Pepper

The movie “Cocktail” may be a love story, but it’s also a love letter to the art of mixology and the delightful world of cocktails. Each of the cocktails featured in the film has its unique charm and flavor profile, making them a hit with fans and cocktail enthusiasts alike. Whether you’re sipping on a Red Eye, enjoying the tropical vibes of the Jamaican Bobsled, or daring to try the Flaming Dr. Pepper, these cocktails are a testament to the creativity and craftsmanship that go into the world of mixology. So, the next time you watch “Cocktail,” consider shaking up one of these iconic drinks to enhance your viewing experience.

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Rent Cocktail on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

There are no surprises in Cocktail , a shallow, dramatically inert romance that squanders Tom Cruise's talents in what amounts to a naive barkeep's banal fantasy.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

Roger Donaldson

Brian Flanagan

Bryan Brown

Douglas 'Doug' Coughlin

Elisabeth Shue

Jordan Mooney

Laurence Luckinbill

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Movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles., critics reviews.

10 Stirring Facts About Cocktail

By roger cormier | jan 23, 2017.

One of cinema's greatest guilty pleasures, Cocktail starred Tom Cruise as Brian Flanagan, a young man who unexpectedly achieves some fame as a "flair bartender" in New York City along with his mentor, Doug Coughlin (Bryan Brown). Brian eventually takes his bottle-flipping skills down to Jamaica, where he falls for Jordan (Elisabeth Shue), a vacationing artist. Here are some facts about the Tom Cruise staple, in accordance with Coughlin's Law.

1. BRIAN FLANAGAN WAS ALMOST TWICE AS OLD IN THE BOOK.

Yes, Cocktail was originally a novel; it was written by Heywood Gould, and based on the dozen years he spent bartending to supplement his income as a writer. Whereas Tom Cruise's Brian Flanagan is in his twenties, Gould's protagonist was described as a "38-year-old weirdo in a field jacket with greasy, graying hair hanging over his collar, his blue eyes streaked like the red sky at morning." As Gould told the Chicago Tribune , "I was in my late 30s, and I was drinking pretty good, and I was starting to feel like I was missing the boat. The character in the book is an older guy who has been around and starting to feel that he's pretty washed-up." Disney and Gould—who adapted his book for the screen—fought over making Brian Flanagan younger, with Gould eventually relenting .

2. THERE WERE AT LEAST 40 DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE SCRIPT.

The script went through a couple of different studios, and dozens of iterations. According to Gould , "there must have been 40 drafts of the screenplay before we went into production. It was originally with Universal. They put it in turnaround because I wasn't making the character likable enough. And then Disney picked it up, and I went through the same process with them. I would fight them at every turn, and there was a huge battle over making the lead younger, which I eventually did."

Bryan Brown explained that when Cruise came on board, the movie "had to change. The studio made the changes to protect the star and it became a much slighter movie because of it."

Kelly Lynch, who played Kerry Coughlin, was much more forthright about how Gould's vision for the story changed under Disney, telling The A.V. Club :

"[Cocktail] was actually a really complicated story about the ’80s and power and money, and it was really re-edited where they completely lost my character’s backstory—her low self-esteem, who her father was, why she was this person that she was—but it was obviously a really successful movie, if not as good as it could’ve been. It was written by the guy who wrote Fort Apache The Bronx, and it was a much darker movie, but Disney took it, reshot about a third of it, and turned it into flipping the bottles and this and that."

3. FOR A BRIEF SECOND, DISNEY WASN'T COMPLETELY SOLD ON TOM CRUISE IN THE LEAD.

Recounting the kind of story that only happens in Hollywood, Gould told the Chicago Tribune about one of his early meetings with Disney heads Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. "Someone mentioned that this might be a good vehicle for Tom Cruise," Gould recalled. "Eisner says, 'He'll never do this, don't waste your time, he can't play this part.' And then Katzenberg says, 'Well, he's really interested in doing it,' and without skipping a beat Eisner says, 'He's perfect for it, a perfect fit!' That's the movie business: I hate him, I love him; I love him, I hate him!"

4. BRYAN BROWN'S AUDITION WAS "DREADFUL."

Director Roger Donaldson specifically wanted Bryan Brown to audition for the role of Doug. Brown flew from Sydney to New York and, almost immediately after his 20-plus-hour flight, was sitting in front of Donaldson. "He did the audition and he was dead tired and it was dreadful," Donaldson said . "After he did it I was like, ‘Bryan, do yourself a favor—we’ve got to do it again tomorrow.’ And he said, ‘No, no, I’m catching a plane back tonight.’ I couldn’t persuade him to stay and do it again, so I didn’t show anybody the audition." Instead, Donaldson told the producers and studio to watch Brown's performance in F/X (1986); clearly, they liked what they saw.

5. CRUISE AND BROWN PRACTICED THEIR FLAIR BARTENDING, AND USED REAL BOTTLES ON SET.

Los Angeles TGI Friday's bartender John Bandy was hired to train Cruise and Brown after he served a woman who worked for Disney who was on the lookout for a bartender for Cocktail . Bandy trained the two stars in the bottle-flipping routines , and Gould took Cruise and Brown to his friend's bar to show them the tricks they used to do . Donaldson claimed they used real bottles—and yes, they did break a few .

6. JAMAICA WASN'T KIND TO TOM CRUISE

The Jamaica exteriors were shot on location, where it was cold, and Cruise got sick. When he and Shue had to shoot a love scene at a jungle waterfall, it wasn't pleasant. "It’s not quite as romantic as it looks,” Cruise told Rolling Stone . “It was more like ‘Jesus, let’s get this shot and get out of here.’ Actually, in certain shots you’ll see that my lips are purple and, literally, my whole body’s shaking.”

7. THE FILM SCORE WAS ENTIRELY REWRITTEN IN A WEEKEND.

Three-time Oscar winner Maurice Jarre ( Lawrence of Arabia ) was Cocktail 's original composer, but the producers didn't think his score "fit in" with the story. They particularly didn't like one cue, so they called in J. Peter Robinson to fix it. Donaldson liked what Robinson did so much, that he asked the composer to take over and do the rest of the work. "All this was happening on a Friday," Robinson said . "I was starting another film on the following Monday and told Roger that I was going to be unavailable. 'We're print-mastering on Monday, mate!!' Roger said. So from that point on I stayed up writing the score and delivered it on Monday morning at around five in the morning."

8. "KOKOMO" WAS WRITTEN FOR THE MOVIE.

While it was The Beach Boys, by then minus Brian Wilson, that recorded the song which brought the group back into the spotlight, "Kokomo" was penned by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas; Scott McKenzie, who wrote “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”; producer Terry Melcher, Doris Day's son; and Mike Love. Phillips wrote the verses, Love wrote the chorus, and Melcher penned the bridge. The specific instructions were to write a song for the part when Brian goes from a bartender in New York to Jamaica. Off of that, Love came up with the "Aruba, Jamaica ..." part .

9. ROGER DONALDSON IS SORRY ABOUT "DON'T WORRY BE HAPPY."

Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" hit number one thanks to its inclusion on the Cocktail soundtrack. The director heard the song on the radio one day while driving to the set. “I heard it and thought it would be perfect for the film," he said . "And suddenly it was everywhere. Sorry about that."

10. THE REVIEWS—INCLUDING TOM CRUISE'S—WERE HARSH.

To conclude his two-star review, Roger Ebert wrote , "The more you think about what really happens in Cocktail, the more you realize how empty and fabricated it really is." Richard Corliss of TIME said it was "a bottle of rotgut in a Dom Perignon box."

In 1992, even Tom Cruise admitted that the movie "was not a crowning jewel" in his career. And Heywood Gould wasn't pleased with it at first either. "I was accused of betraying my own work, which is stupid," Gould said . "So I was pretty devastated. I literally couldn't get out of bed for a day. The good thing about that experience is that it toughened me up. It was like basic training. This movie got killed, and then after that I was OK with getting killed—I got killed a few more times since then, but it hasn't bothered me."

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The Best Tom Cruise Year Is ...

… maybe not the most obvious one. But when Cruise made ‘Cocktail’ and ‘Rain Man,’ he unlocked a new side that would define the quintessential movie star’s career for decades to come.

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You’ve probably already heard the stories about Tom Cruise’s preposterous level of effort in the new Mission: Impossible—Fallout, in which he plays the role of Ethan Hunt for the sixth time in 22 years. Of course the aggressively ageless 56-year-old performs his own stunts. At one point, he broke his ankle after slamming into the side of a damn building—and then pulled himself up, and ran across the roof. And then there’s the spectacular helicopter chase sequence, for which Cruise (again, of course ) learned how to really pilot a helicopter. Elsewhere, when he’s not risking life and actual limbs in Fallout , he is doing that rigorous, purposeful Tom Cruise sprint , like Jim Fixx on a Red Bull bender.

That’s the one thing everyone — fans and critics alike — always says about him: Tom Cruise works hard. Working hard is his brand. He’s, well, worked very hard to make it so.

But what if he didn’t work quite so hard? Not to suggest that Tom Cruise has ever coasted, exactly. But what if he let himself lay back just a little bit and allowed the centrifugal force of his one-in-a-billion movie-star charisma propel him forward? Is it possible that this would make the longest-tenured A-list movie star since Clint Eastwood even more watchable?

Almost 30 years ago to the day, millions of people lined up to see the latest Tom Cruise movie, and the stakes couldn’t have been lower. The mission was not impossible; it was impossibly mundane. What mattered were dreams … and cocktails … Cocktails & Dreams, if you will. And people were fine with that! All it took to put butts in seats was this simple log line: Tom Cruise plays a sexy bartender . That’s it. Nothing else was required — no special effects, no elaborate cinematic universe, and certainly no broken ankles.

This is not to say that Tom Cruise sloughed off in Cocktail, one of the more popular, and least reputable, films in his oeuvre. He tossed bottles in synchronized motion with costar Bryan Brown. He rode horses on the beach with love interest Elisabeth Shue. He resisted the string-bikini’d bod of Kelly Lynch. He reacted with appropriate pathos to one of the all-time left-field suicide scenes. He put in work.

When was the last time you watched Cocktail ? Oh, you’ve never watched Cocktail ? Wow … I really don’t want to spoil this one. I’ll run down the essentials: Cruise plays Brian Flanagan, a wannabe business tycoon and military veteran (!) who moves to the big city in order to get rich, and then becomes a bartender at a TGI Fridays. And that’s basically all you need to know.

What Cocktail is really about is the desirability of Tom Cruise circa 1988. Put another way: Everybody in this movie wants to fuck him — Shue, Lynch, even Brown, kind of. Women literally paw at his legs when he stands on a bar top to recite tavern-inspired poetry. (This is also a thing that happens in Cocktail. ) He is, in no uncertain terms, a sex object.

“Doug says you’re incredible with women — a real lady-killer,” Lynch drools near the end of Cocktail as she corners a semi-willing Cruise. “What’s your secret weapon?”

“Well,” Cruise says, flashing his trademark toothy grin, “what you see is what you get.”

He’s not lying.

Cocktail played a pivotal role in consolidating Cruise’s burgeoning stardom, a star vehicle built on the flimsiest of premises that grossed $78 million domestically (and another $93 million around the world), good for the ninth-best box-office haul of 1988, an achievement that could only be attributed to Cruise’s mega-watt marquee appeal. But it never fully registered as a career triumph. Not long after Cocktail unleashed so many dubious fads on American pop culture — including two of the era’s most grating pop hits, the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo” and Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” to say nothing of acrobatic mixology — Cruise distanced himself from the film.

“It’s painful as hell,” Cruise says of watching Cocktail in a 1990 Rolling Stone profile . “I mean, I worked my ass off on that movie.” Again with the work ethic, Tom.

Defenders of Cocktail have tried to couch it as a “secretly dark” look at ’80s “greed is good” culture, a depiction not far off from the eccentric barfly novel on which it is based. Screenwriter Heywood Gould, who also wrote the book, later claimed that the script went through 40 different iterations, with the film’s studio, Disney, constantly pressing to make Flanagan younger, more likable, and, ultimately, more Cruise-like. But even after all of those revisions, Cocktail was still watered down further during production.

“It was a much darker movie,” Lynch told The A.V. Club in 2012 , “but Disney took it, reshot about a third of it, and turned it into flipping the bottles and this and that.”

When I revisited Cocktail recently, I could see traces of the more biting film it might have been. Flanagan is a prototypical working-class stiff who is twisted by capitalism into a money-obsessed douche, lending his blandly handsome bro-ness a faintly tragic lilt. But I prefer to accept Cocktail on its own compromised, cheesy terms. Forget the Reagan-era subtext. This is an enjoyable dumb movie, and it is best appreciated as a superficial confection. What you see is what you get.

And it deserves better. Cocktail isn’t any campier than Top Gun , with its slow-motion volleyball action, overwrought “Take My Breath Away” love scene, and Val Kilmer’s playfully unrestrained homoeroticism. So why is Cocktail the movie that Cruise has to live down?

In May, Cruise started filming Top Gun: Maverick , which is currently slated to arrive in theaters around this time in 2019. Cruise started teasing the possibility of a sequel to the 1986 film two years ago, on Jimmy Kimmel Live! He is, as always, committed to the enterprise, even if it is wholly unnecessary. But the closest Cruise will likely ever come to reviving Cocktail was a career-spanning bit with another late-night host, James Corden, on that same 2016 press cycle. This is a shame — I would rather watch a prequel delving into Flanagan’s mysterious Army background than a movie about Maverick’s kid . Call it Cocktail: First Blood. (I will nevertheless watch the movie about Maverick’s kid.)

This willingness to revisit Top Gun , and reticence to embrace Cocktail , presumably boils down to one thing for Cruise: He had to train in an F-14 to make Top Gun , whereas Cocktail only needed that dumb hook — Tom Cruise plays a sexy bartender — to be a success. He worked hard on Cocktail , but he didn’t have to work hard. He just had to be Tom Cruise.

But he didn’t want to be that Tom Cruise anymore. And he wouldn’t be ever again.

For millennials and Generation Z, there’s never been a world in which Cruise wasn’t among the most famous people on the planet. (August 5 marks the 35th anniversary of Risky Business , Cruise’s big breakthrough, released one month after his 21st birthday.) He’s practically an elemental property at this point.

But there have been oscillations in his fame. You might remember them, the way you can recall down seasons for a dynastic sports franchise. Like in the mid-’00s, during that disastrous press cycle for 2005’s War of the Worlds , marred by the Oprah Winfrey incident and that time he got testy with Matt Lauer. (When does Cruise get awarded his revisionist history bonus points for the last one?) The past few years have been another struggle: 2016’s Jack Reacher: Never Go Back and 2017’s The Mummy were widely derided duds. But his late-’10s period hasn’t been as down as you might think: Last year’s American Made , while not exactly great, is awfully hard not to watch when it pops up on airplanes or HBO.

Cruise has been around for so long, all while working steadily and prolifically, that you can break his career into notable eras, or even memorable years. Many of his notable films come in bunches. There’s 1986, the year of Top Gun and The Color of Money , his first movie to gross more than $100 million and his first “adult” drama . There’s 1996, the “blockbuster” year, distinguished by Jerry Maguire and the first Mission: Impossible , which combined grossed more than $731 million worldwide. (That’s about $1.2 billion in 2018 dollars.) There’s 1999, the “prestige” year, with Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia , neither of which nabbed him that elusive Oscar . And then there’s the opposite of a prestige year, 2012, marked by late-career guilty pleasures Rock of Ages and (the pretty good!) first Jack Reacher film.

But if I’m picking my favorite Tom Cruise year, I’m going back to 1988, his “transitional” year, when he released Cocktail at the end of July and Rain Man , his road movie–buddy picture with Dustin Hoffman, one week before Christmas. Between the release of those radically different movies, from October to December, he filmed Born on the Fourth of July with Oliver Stone, playing the paraplegic Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, which garnered him his first Oscar nomination.

Rain Man was even more successful than Cocktail , tallying a worldwide gross of nearly $355 million and four Oscars. (It was no. 1 at the American box office that year, which seems all the more incredible in these franchise-saturated times.) Cruise undoubtedly was a primary reason for the former, though he wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award. But Rain Man gave him something far more valuable — a pathway to the “mature” second act of his professional life, to the success of Born on the Fourth of July and beyond.

When you look at the best years of Cruise’s career, there’s an obvious yin-and-yang quality, typically balancing an action tent-pole like Top Gun and Mission Impossible with a “smaller” film such as The Color of Money or Jerry Maguire. This contrast is starkest in ’88, between the disreputable camp classic and the award-winning family drama.

An oft-repeated complaint about Cruise’s recent filmography is the loss of that balance. It’s been this way for about 15 years. In the early ’00s, he made two risky sci-fi films, 2001’s Vanilla Sky and 2002’s Minority Report , and his overall best movie of the 21st century, 2004’s Collateral , along with requisite business-minded ventures like 2000’s Mission: Impossible II and 2003’s forgettable but very profitable The Last Samurai.

Cruise hasn’t made a movie remotely like Collateral since then. In the past decade, he has tilted heavily to tent-poles with astronomical budgets, including four more Mission: Impossible films. Then again, Hollywood has also abandoned yang in order to focus solely on yin. And Tom Cruise and Hollywood are nothing if not symbiotic. You don’t get to your 35th year as a movie star without always adapting to the present climate.

Cruise has been a rare constant in Hollywood since the early ’80s. But neither Cruise nor Hollywood has stayed the same. There have been several reinventions for both American institutions along the way.

Time, for one, moved much slower in 1988. A lot could happen in six months. The Tom Cruise of Cocktail is not the Tom Cruise of Rain Man. When you toggle between those films, you get the rare opportunity to witness an iconic actor grow up in real time.

Tom Cruise in 1988 is like U2 in 1983. In the video for “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” filmed live at Red Rocks Amphitheater outside of Denver, Bono is still an awkward kid — he has a mullet, a sleeveless shirt, knee-high boots, and an abundance of spirited high kicks. He’s not really the stadium-rock Bono yet. But every so often you catch a glimmer in his eyes that says, I think I know how to own these people. I’m not there yet, but I’m on my way. Cruise similarly came into his own as a grown-up star in the transition from Cocktail and Rain Man. Though Bono didn’t completely lose the mullet for another four years, Cruise’s transformation was far more condensed.

If Cocktail truly is a failure — I don’t think it is, but Cruise does — it is first and foremost a failure of career planning. It’s a little like Bono briefly reverting to his Under a Blood Red Sky guise between The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby. Cocktail was a throwback to the early ’80s Tom Cruise of Losin’ It and Legend , before he got his act together and became the Tom Cruise, a movie star who transcends time, generations, and bodily harm . Cocktail feels out of place between The Color of Money and Rain Man in Cruise’s catalog, in the midst of his “apprenticeship” period, when he dutifully shared the spotlight with respected elders from the ’60s and ’70s like Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman, on the way to becoming an elder himself. (This continued with Robert Duvall in Days of Thunder , Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men , and Gene Hackman in The Firm , culminating with Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut. )

Standing next to distinguished gentlemen makes you look distinguished. In Cocktail , Cruise resembles a man in his mid-20s who still lives with roommates and sleeps on a mattress on the floor. In Rain Man , he’s that same guy after he’s settled down with a nice girl and an IKEA charge card. This shift from innocence to experience defines the crux of Cocktail and Rain Man. After Cocktail , a cinematic mullet if there ever was one, Cruise would never be so guileless again on screen.

Rain Man made Paul Thomas Anderson realize that he loves Tom Cruise more than most people.

“He’s funny too!” Anderson raved last December to Bill Simmons . “Cruise is funny . When you see Tom Cruise on screen, name me anyone else that can do that right now.”

Cruise’s portrayal of Charlie Babbitt — luxury car huckster, mocker of his disabled brother, impatient clapper when people aren’t moving fast enough — helped to inspire Frank T.J. Mackey, the role Anderson created for Cruise in 1999’s Magnolia. You don’t need to squint hard to see the parallels. Charlie and Frank are unlikable assholes nursing wounded hearts and troubled relationships with their fathers. They abuse people as a way of keeping the world at arm’s length, the ultimate form of self-abuse. And when they achieve catharsis, they aren’t redeemed — their souls have thawed, but they haven’t stopped being assholes.

They are also, like PTA says, very funny characters, mostly because they are excuses for Cruise to launch into prolonged mental breakdowns. Is there anything better than Tom Cruise huffing, puffing, gesticulating, becoming unglued, yelling , and finally losing his freaking mind?

For years, distinguished directors lined up to run Cruise through the wringer: Scorsese, Levinson, Stone, Pollack, De Palma, Crowe, and Kubrick all delighted in driving him absolutely wild. What fresh torture can we inflict on Tom Cruise this time? Put him in a wheelchair! Strip him of his lucrative sports-agent career! Send him on a metaphorical “journey into the night” that doubles as a rumination on the compromises inherent to any marriage! Now, step back and watch the glorious madness commence.

During the prelude to the 61st Academy Awards, Hoffman was the favorite to win Best Actor for Rain Man . He did just that. (The other nominees that year included Tom Hanks for Big and Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver , both of whom seem leagues better in retrospect.) At the time, Hoffman’s performance was widely admired as a landmark in the portrayal of a disabled person on film. But since then, Hoffman’s stock has plummeted and Cruise’s has skyrocketed. It’s now become a cliché to talk about how much better Cruise is than Hoffman in Rain Man , even though he supposedly has the less showy role.

This is only half true. Cruise is indeed superior to Hoffman’s mannered, dated performance as Raymond Babbitt, which now seems like a cartoonish caricature of a person with autism. But Cruise’s work in Rain Man can’t really be described as not showy. While Hoffman exists as a static irritant, Cruise is reactive to the extreme. He’s big and bombastic, and he dominates the film’s dramatic arc. He’s the one the audience relates with, the one who changes from the start of the story to the end — not much, but enough. It’s dazzling to witness. Rain Man is the greatest breakdown of Tom Cruise’s career.

If Cruise’s role was merely to support Hoffman’s campaign to win a second Oscar, he doesn’t act like it. He knew how good the role of Charlie was. He spent two years working on the script, starting back when he was promoting Top Gun in 1986. “What I gave him is the thing that he hasn’t often had the opportunity to do: work with a full character,” Levinson told Rolling Stone in 1989.

As Charlie, Cruise is a man constantly reminded of how he falls short, and there is no guarantee that he won’t carry on making the same mistakes after the credits roll. It is a complicated depiction of adulthood, whereas Flanagan’s magical turnaround in Cocktail — he marries Shue, agrees to be a father to his unborn child, and opens his own bar — is a child’s fairy tale.

If it’s been a while since you watched it, or you’ve never seen Rain Man , go do it now. My wife and I revisited it last week, and we barely noticed Hoffman. Meanwhile, we couldn’t stop laughing — or cringing — at Cruise. We hadn’t seen it since our two kids were born, and now it was impossible not to watch Rain Man as an allegory about the frustrations of parenthood. Charlie is not a parent; he’s merely tasked (by his own greed and resentment over essentially being cut out of his father’s will) with taking care of his brother. But his rage over, say, not being able to get his brother to board an airplane , in spite of deploying simple logic and facts , felt extremely familiar.

The central struggle of taking care of a person who can’t take care of themselves is over control. The dance between caregiver and care-receiver requires the giver to convince the receiver to acquiesce; this means the receiver is actually in the power position at all times, even when it appears that the opposite is so. No matter Rain Man ’s other deficiencies, particularly when judged according to modern sensibilities, the way the film depicts that dance still feels true.

Charlie Babbitt is Patient Zero for Cruise’s strongest subsequent performances, which all concern power in some way. Cruise plays men who want to command their surroundings, and can’t, thus causing all that imminently watchable turmoil. Ron Kovic can’t control his body. Cole Trickle can’t control his emotions behind the wheel. Lt. Daniel Kaffee can’t control his court case. Mitch McDeere can’t control his own life once it is infiltrated by the mob. Jerry Maguire can’t control Rod Tidwell. William Harford can’t control his wife’s sexual desires. Frank T.J. Mackey can’t control the TV reporter who is about to expose him.

And that need for control clearly resonates with Cruise in his real life. What could be the cause of his fixation on hard work? Could it be a desire to account for every possible outcome, to ensure that he never falls from his perch? Either way, all of that planning and plotting and persnickety obsessing has clearly paid off. If you can will yourself to run on a broken ankle, or carry on each time news breaks about the weirdness of your personal life, you can accomplish anything.

But nobody is perfect. For Cruise, Cocktail represented a loss of control — he couldn’t change the final product or prevent the short-term damage it caused to his reputation. But with Rain Man , he was able to channel his control-freak tendencies into a character who must accept that the arc of the universe is long but bends toward accepting that Wapner must be watched in five minutes.

By the end of 1988, Tom Cruise showed that he could sublimate himself on purpose . He turned powerlessness into a superpower.

Steven Hyden is the author of two books, including Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock , out now from Dey Street Books. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine , The Washington Post , Billboard , Pitchfork , Rolling Stone , Grantland , The A.V. Club , Slate , and Salon . He is currently the cultural critic at UPROXX and the host of the Celebration Rock podcast.

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Cocktail (1988)

Tom cruise: brian flanagan.

• Photos (63)
• Quotes (24)

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Quotes 

[Last Barman poem] 

Brian : I am the last barman poet / I see America drinking the fabulous cocktails I make / Americans getting stinky on something I stir or shake / The sex on the beach / The schnapps made from peach / The velvet hammer / The Alabama slammer. / I make things with juice and froth / The pink squirrel / The three-toed sloth. / I make drinks so sweet and snazzy / The iced tea / The kamakazi / The orgasm / The death spasm / The Singapore sling / The dingaling. / America you've just been devoted to every flavor I got / But if you want to got loaded / Why don't you just order a shot? / Bar is open.

Bonnie : Please, I don't want to end it this way.

Brian : Jesus, everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn't end.

Brian : Days get shorter and shorter, nights longer and longer, before you know it, your life is just one long night with a few comatose daylight hours.

[last lines] 

Jordan : Bet I can still spook you.

Brian : No way.

[she whispers in his ear] 

Brian : Twins? Twins?

[to everyone] 

Brian : Twins! Drinks are on the house!

Uncle Pat : No! No!

Brian : The bar is open!

[Flanagan's advice to his unborn child:] 

Brian : If Jordan gives birth to a fine Irish son / There will be Cocktails and Dreams for him one day to run / A business that will yield the financial windfall / To be franchised in every suburban shopping mall. / If a daughter arrives to bless our clan / I guess the shit will finally hit the fan / But this I shall promise thee / I'll never let her marry a guy like me. / Still if our child is the naughtiest of girls or the wildest of young men / I swear I'll be the best dad I can / And never ever get spooked again.

Brian : Coughlin's law: never show surprise, never lose your cool.

Brian : Should we let it breathe?

Doug : It hasn't breathed for fifty years, it's dead. Let's just drink it.

Brian : You're offering me a job?

Doug : Uh huh.

Brian : The waitresses hate me!

Doug : You wait till you've given them crabs. Then you'll really know hatred.

[Jordan is drawing a picture of Brian] 

Brian : So this is your profession.

Jordan : More like my... obsession.

Brian : To pay the rent?

Jordan : Someday it will.

Brian : I'm willing to start at the bottom.

Job Interviewer : You're aiming too high.

Brian : I'm looking for the Manager.

Doug : What's the problem? Did you find a hair in your quiche?

Brian : No, I'm looking for a job.

Doug : Ah, you'd like to put a hair in somebody else's quiche.

Doug : Mighty Casey has struck out.

Brian : The game's not over yet. It wouldn't be any fun if they fell over with their legs in the air, would it?

Brian : I'll stick with the brew.

Doug : Beer is for breakfast around here, drink or be gone.

[Jordan has returned to her father's Park Avenue penthouse to find Brian arguing with him] 

Brian : I think there's a chance for us.

Jordan : Brian, there is no "us." There's too many things about "us" that don't work.

Brian : What about the baby? A kid needs a father.

Jordan : Not one who's not going to be around in a year?

Mr. Mooney : Yeah, with your lifestyle, what kind of a father would you...

Jordan : Dad!

Brian : Listen, I'm sorry I called you a bitch.

Eleanor : Why? I am a bitch.

Brian : Not a goddamned thing any one of those professors says makes a difference on the street.

Doug : If you know that, you're ready to graduate.

Mr. Mooney : You're on your own.

Brian : That's the only way I want it.

Brian : [telling Bonnie he's moving out of her place]  I left a can of Spam in your refrigerator... I hope your Brewers Yeast doesn't take it personally.

Brian : [looking at Jordan's painting]  Is this our waterfall?

Jordan : No.

Brian : It's terrific.

Jordan : Yeah, it's all right. The name's Mooney, not Monet.

Bonnie : I've been thinking about you all day.

Brian : Really? A plane ride home will cure that.

Jordan : What are you doing here?

Brian : I bet you thought you'd never see me again.

Jordan : *Hoped* is a better word!

[first lines] 

Brian : Come on, put it to the floor! Come on! Let's go!

Brian : You wouldn't treat a stray dog like this.

Jordan : A stray dog can be *loyal*.

Brian : I can't *make it with my best friend's old lady.

Kerry Coughlin : Ami I supposed to live with the same man *forever and no one else in my life?

Brian : Yes! It's called *marriage.

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Screen Rant

New road house movie proves it’s time to remake tom cruise’s 36-year-old thriller with 9% on rotten tomatoes.

With the recent success of the 2024 Road House remake, a critically-panned Tom Cruise movie from 36 years ago could also benefit from a remake.

• Modern reinterpretation of classic '80s movies, like the Amazon Prime Road House remake, can be successful and pave the way for more updates.
• A Cocktail remake could improve on the original's flaws with strong lead, action, and romance, following the success of Road House.
• Including a Tom Cruise cameo in a Cocktail remake could honor the original's legacy and capitalize on nostalgia for the '80s film.

The success of the Amazon Prime Road House remake perfectly demonstrates that a modern take on an oft-forgotten Tom Cruise movie from 36 years ago could also benefit from a modern reinterpretation. While far from perfect, Road House 's reviews are good enough to validate the remake's existence, while also paving the way for other classic '80s movies to receive the update treatment. Additionally, the Road House 2 tease , suggests the entertainment industry isn't quite done with modernizing classic action thrillers, further highlighting the potential for other '80s movie remakes.

Many of Tom Cruise's best movies are from the 1980s, but one movie in particular is among one of his most poorly received movies to date. As such, its legacy could actually benefit from a remake, as it isn't uncommon for remakes of classic movies to be better than the original. Furthermore, as demonstrated by the recent success of Top Gun: Maverick , it's very possible that a modern remake of the late '80s critical disaster in Cruise's filmography could benefit from a modern retelling. As such, one Cruise movie from the '80s needs a remake after Road House 's success .

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Road house 2024's success proves a remake of tom cruise's cocktail movie could work, cocktail's similar vibe and setting are already perfect for a remake..

Based on the Heywood Gould novel of the same name, Cocktail sees Cruise as a New York City business student who takes up bartending in Jamaica to make ends meet. Filled with beautiful scenery and a unique cast of characters, Cocktail is unfortunately marred by a confusing message, as the movie's emphasis on Cruise's Brian Flanagan making money overshadows the forced love subplot between himself and Elisabeth Shue's Jordan Mooney. As such, a remake of Cocktail could work well since it would be the perfect chance to restructure its themes .

Cocktail 's remake would need a strong lead, compelling action, and believable romance to improve its predecessor's failures.

With a similar laid-back vibe combined with the ridiculousness of most '80s thriller movies , a Cocktail remake for modern audiences could maintain its unique Jamaican location and underdog protagonist, while blending it with modern romantic storytelling devices. Jake Gyllenhaal's Road House remake worked because it demonstrated that it was capable of keeping the good elements from the past, such as its location and hard-as-nails protagonist, while updating them with modern martial arts sensibilities and romantic storytelling. Cocktail 's remake would need a strong lead, compelling action, and believable romance to improve its predecessor's failures.

Cocktail's Divisive Legacy Would Give A Remake A Bigger Advantage Than Road House 2024

Road house needed to remain as faithful to its original movie as possible..

Cocktail isn't as fondly remembered as Road House , so a remake could be good for its legacy , and while the 1989 Road House isn't a critical darling, it still has a dedicated following that admires it greatly despite its flaws. As such, the remake needed to remain somewhat faithful to it. Cocktail is not as beloved, so a competent remake might actually be better for a proposed remake. Aside from possible cameos by Cruise and Shue, virtually nothing from the original Cocktail would need to be in a remake, which is a stark difference from Road House .

Who Could Play Tom Cruise's Character In A Cocktail Remake?

Just as Jake Gyllenhaal has proven to be a worthy replacement for Patrick Swayze's original iconic Dalton , there are plenty of candidates who could fill Tom Cruise's shoes in a Cocktail reboot. In the 1988 movie, Cruise's Brian is typified by his youthful charisma and hot-headedness . While he is ultimately driven by his dream of having his own string of successful franchise bars, he is also impulsive and motivated by his passionate relationship with Elizabeth Shue's Jordan . Throughout the story, he looks up to the older Doug as a source of inspiration – despite problematic aspects to his personality.

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Because of Brian's arc, the ideal replacement would be someone youthful enough to be believable as a man at the start of his professional journey with a track record of portraying difficult relationships with mentor figures. After his performance in Top Gun: Maverick , Miles Teller could be a great option , and would be a satisfying nod to Cocktail 's Cruise-centric origins. Another choice could be Spider-Man star Tom Holland , who has both shown himself capable of embodying a difficult mentor/mentee relationship with Tony Stark and also displayed his bartending skills in Uncharted . Both candidates could bring something unique and interesting to Brian.

Tom Cruise Could Still Appear In A Cocktail Remake

Unlike Road House , which was sadly limited by Patrick Swayze's untimely passing in 2009, a Cocktail remake could potentially feature a cameo from original star Tom Cruise. Given Cruise's age, it would not make sense for him to return and play Brian Flanagan again – unless the film took a completely different approach to the story. However, including Cruise in a brief cameo could be a great way for a Cocktail remake to honor the original's legacy while progressing the story forward.

By necessity, Road House almost entirely avoided explicit ties to the original film. Although Gyllenhaal and Swayze's characters share the same name, there is no room for other returnees like Sam Elliott's Wade Garrett . While this helps the film distinguish itself from its predecessor, it also means that it fails to fully capitalize on the potential of nostalgia. Cocktail may not have been as critically successful as Road House , but the movie's notoriety and contemporary box office success means that a Tom Cruise cameo can help a remake acknowledge its surprising impact.

Road House (2024)

Road House is a remake of the original 1989 film, which followed protagonist Dalton, a Ph.D. educated bouncer at the roughest bar in the south known as the Double Deuce. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Dalton, with two major changes including Dalton being a retired UFC fighter and the bar locale being in the Florida Keys.