Tom Cruise? Wasn’t he famous in, like, 1987? Some movie about jet fighter pilots or something? Oh, and there was the movie about his autistic brother, but that was 20 years ago, too.

It’s been four years since Mission: Impossible III, which is the last movie you could really call a “Tom Cruise movie.” (He’s made others since, though only as a company player: Valkyrie, Lions for Lambs, Tropic Thunder. And he’s been quite good in all of them. But they weren’t “Tom Cruise movies.”). It’s a stretch to call MI3 a hit, since it cost $150 million to make — and gods only know how much to market — yet it earned only $134 million in North America. Yeah, sure, all the cool kids today talk about global takings, and MI3 earned $397 million around the planet (including the U.S. and Canada) so it probably turned a profit. But that’s a cop-out. Movies used to make multigazillions in the U.S. alone, and that was enough. Global box office used to be just gravy after the booty scored domestically.

No more. At least no more when it comes to hugely budgeted action films with megastars who command megasalaries … I challenge you to name even one such movie over the last few years. They don’t exist anymore. Oh, sure: there are blockbusters that earn $300 million or more domestically. But they don’t do it on the basis of movie stars enticing butts into multiplex seats. Most of the biggest movies of the last few years have been driven not by stars but by concept: boy wizard, sparkly vampire boyfriend, drunken weekend in Vegas, giant space robots. And so on.

Now we have Knight and Day, an action spy comedy thriller blah blah blah, starring Cruise — whose dazzling smile is still enough to distract you, at least for a moment or two, from the fact that he’s looking kinda old and tired these days — and Cameron Diaz as the ditzy blonde, even though she’s getting a bit long in the tooth for that role, too. The film is rumored to have cost 20th Century Fox just under $100 million to make … much of which will have gone to pay the salaries of Cruise and Diaz, who have been among the most highly paid movie stars of recent years. (Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it’s likely he was paid around $20 million plus profit participation — he earned that much for Valkryie, in which he had a much smaller role — and that she was paid around $10 million. That’s a full third of the budget. In other words, the same film could have been made starring Bradley Cooper and Megan Fox and cost $70 million, or less.) You look at the trailer, and it’s a little bit cute and a little bit pathetic that we’re being sold this movie on, almost entirely, the charms of Cruise and Diaz.

I’m not saying they’re not charming. But I’m just not sure that they’re $10 and $20 million charming. I haven’t seen anything so far concerning Knight and Day that says to me: “This movie could not exist without the talents of Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz.” What I do see is an action comedy that might do better, in fact, with the likes of a Bradley Cooper and a Megan Fox who don’t come overly burdened with movie-star expectations.

I’ll say this: When Knight and Day opens in the U.S. and Canada — which it will do just before Fourth of July weekend — and doesn’t earn more than $30 million that first important weekend, studio execs and box-office watchers will be wringing their hands and wondering what the hell it can possibly mean that Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz cannot dominate a summer preholiday weekend. But we already know: Audiences don’t care anymore about movie stars. They only care about stuff blowing up real good. They don’t care whose face it’s blowing up in.

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MaryAnn Johanson is more shades of gray than night and day at FlickFilosopher.com. (email me)

Tags: cameron diaz, knight and day, tom cruise