Tom Cruise concedes that TV and Netflix create some jobs

“I have nothing against cable or TV or Netflix. I think it’s great. Create jobs and everything,” Cruise says in the interview. “But what I like about cinema is it is all of us coming together in a room and sharing an experience. I say, “Understand the tools, then go create what you want to create.” When I’m working with people, I’m not afraid to, as I’m acting, to look foolish, to do it. It’s like: That’s not what this is about. It’s finding our tone, finding these tools together and having an experience.” 

Cruise says something else about Netflix elsewhere in the interview, this time a bit more unambiguously positive. When his interviewer suggests that the younger generation of audiences are more likely to know Cruise’s action movies than, say, Eyes Wide Shut or Magnolia or Jerry Maguire, Cruise is quick to disagree. “Surprisingly, that’s not true. When you go to a premiere, there’s three, four generations of people that are there. When you look at Netflix, they are able to taste and see these different kinds of films,” says Cruise. “So those things we’ve discovered in terms of how a library travels globally.” Cruise is probably right that Netflix functions better as a library than a movie theater—albeit a library you have to constantly pay for and a library where materials can disappear at any time.