Mission Immpossible's World Wide Box Office : $218.6m & Counting

Fresh off the success of "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol," Tom Cruise is looking bulletproof at the box office at a time when the rest of Hollywood has been struggling.

The 49-year-old actor has emerged with the one — and only — true hit during a holiday stretch that has been devastating for the film industry, down 10% from this time last year, according to Hollywood.com.

Star power doesn't always equate to drawing power at the multiplex, as Cruise himself found out as recently in "Knight and Day." Just ask Daniel Craig and Matt Damon, beloved actors who took it on the chin this Christmas weekend with "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and "We Bought a Zoo," respectively.

"In the USA, with all of the ways we have to communicate with each other about whether we like something or don't like something, information travels so quickly, that for better or worse, in the U.S. people are going to be interested in you because you have a star, but then instantly are going to care if the movie’s good," says Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount Pictures, the studio behind the "Mission: Impossible" franchise.

"And if you have a star in a movie that isn't good, people instantly know it, and discover it and share it and you don't do any business. If you have a star in a movie that's great, that's where you can break out of the pack in a very crowded Christmas window."

Where Cruise and other celebrities’ names matter most is overseas, nowadays the bulk of a movie's box office, where moviegoers still get star-struck. And Cruise's mission — and he chose to accept it as a producer on the film — was to dutifully go and sign autographs and pose for pictures from Dubai to Rio and everywhere in between, says Moore.

In the case of "Mission: Impossible," though, Cruise wasn't just lucky to be attached to a movie that took in $46.2 million over the four-day holiday period, to raise its worldwide haul to $218.6 million and counting.

He simply outworked the competition.

"Tom Cruise goes to these markets — he'll go to South Korea, he'll go to Japan, he'll make a huge number of personal appearances," says Edward Jay Epstein, author of "The Hollywood Economist." "Without him "Mission: Impossible" wouldn't exist as a franchise. It's really a one man effort.

"The 'Mission: Impossible' franchise is almost an impossible franchise compared to Batman or 'Spider-Man' or 'Iron Man' or whatever you have, because those are all based on comic books and comics have a built-in young audience and those are the people who turn out to the movie theater Friday and Saturday night.

'Mission: Impossible' is based on a television series which the audience that remembers seeing it is now over 60. Which makes it all the more difficult for Tom Cruise to convert it to the big screen."

That being said, the movie business is a fickle one: Cruise can always come in to the top of the A-list like a lion right now and then go out like a "Lions for Lambs" for his next movie.

"Stars have become a less important commodity in the selling of a movie nowadays," says Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst for Hollywood.com. "But Cruise has really come back from the days of the [couch jumping\]on ‘Oprah,’ and the Brooke Shields debacle and all his PR mistakes.

"I think moviegoers are really rooting for him at this point."