Was Tom Cruise Important To Paramount?

Roger Friedman of Fox News makes a good point: except for the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, most of Tom Cruise's movies over the past decade have been for other studios.

Indeed, Paramount was lucky that "War of the Worlds," Cruise’s most recent film prior to 'M:I3,' was his biggest ever. "War" did $234 million in the end, absolutely the best ever for a Cruise project. Yet most $100 million Cruise films were made — with the exception of the mystifying "Vanilla Sky" — elsewhere. "Collateral" was Dreamworks, "Minority Report" came from 20th Century Fox, "The Last Samurai" was Warner Bros., "Eyes Wide Shut" — a huge disaster — was also from Warner’s. "Jerry Maguire," still Cruise’s best film in a decade, was at Columbia Pictures.

The movies he did produce for Paramount (other than MI and that Spielberg collaboration? The Others, Ask The Dust, Elizabethtown and Narc.