As he was becoming a superstar in the early 1990s, Tom Cruise ended up influencing a Disney classic, despite not actually being involved in the movie. Cruise rose to fame with his breakout role in the classic teen comedy Risky Business. However, he proved himself a movie star with his role as Maverick in Top Gun.
Since then, Cruise has remained one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, with a mix of acclaimed performances and big spectacle movies. His Mission: Impossible franchise has recently come to an end, but the actor has made many other classic movies throughout his career, like Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, Collateral, Minority Report, and many more.
Cruise is such a big star that he has even influenced movies in which he doesn’t appear. This includes shaping a very key aspect of one of the best Disney animated movies of all time.
Aladdin Was Changed To Be More Like Tom Cruise
The Original Look For Aladdin Was Deemed Too Boyish
Tom Cruise is one of the rare A-list actors who has never made an animated movie. Regardless of that, he was a major influence on one of the best animated heroes of all time. When Disney was making its classic animated musical adventure Aladdin, there were a lot of opinions on what the тιтular character should look like.
Originally, the animators wanted to design a smaller and more boyish hero to separate him to distinguish him from the typical Prince Charming Disney characters, who were perceived as bland and uninteresting. However, Disney Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg found that the character was not believable as a romantic interest for Jasmine in this iteration.
Seeking to capture the underdog quality of the character while also making him a believable hero, Katzenberg looked to one of the most popular stars of the time and had animators examine Tom Cruise’s performance in 1986’s Top Gun to shape the character (via Los Angeles Times):
“In all his poses, I noticed there was a confidence, a look in the eyebrows, that gives him intensity and at the same time a smile that has kind of an impish look, like he’s got something up his sleeve,”
The new look was modeled on Cruise and accepted as the perfect interpretation of the heroic Aladdin, thus making Disney history.
Aladdin’s Tom Cruise Change Clearly Worked
Tom Cruise Proved To Be The Ideal Inspiration For One Of Disney’s Best Heroes
While there is a lot of work that goes into creating animated characters, the approach of using Tom Cruise as inspiration for Aladdin proved to be the perfect choice. As much as Aladdin stands on his own as an iconic Disney character, it is possible to see the aspects of Cruise that were used for the movie.
Disney had never really delivered a male hero like this before.
It’s hard to say whether the original version of Aladdin would have been accepted by audiences, but the Cruise influence perfectly captured that desired element of an underdog who also has a lot of confidence and heroic swagger. These are qualities that Cruise has been able to capture throughout his career.
Cruise’s famous hero roles as Maverick in Top Gun or Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible movies are characters who are constantly against the odds. However, they also feel like they are the only ones who can get the job done. Disney had never really delivered a male hero like this before.
Robin Williams’ Genie in Aladdin rightly gets a lot of the attention, but the movie would have fallen apart without the right hero to lead it. This new design for Aladdin ended up leading to one of the defining movies of the Disney Renaissance era.
