It's going to be a while before you stop talking about Tom Cruise. Even before the divorce, the fiftieth birthday, the release of the Jack Reacher trailer, and now the Forbes report that he is the highest paid actor in Hollywood, the dude was relevant. Mash all of that together in a five-day span, and he's bound to occupy the supermarket aisle headlines for months to come. As up-and-down a week as the star has been having, there is a silver lining here: people are starting to love him again.

As mentioned above, Forbes ranks Cruise as the highest paid actor — he reportedly earned $75 million between May of 2011 and May of 2012 (Leonardo DiCaprio and Adam Sandler were the runners-up with $37 million). Aside from providing opportunity for a Scrooge McDuck style swim in a pool of gold coins, this bit of news does come with other positive connotations: it means he's the most valuable actor alive today. It means he's the hottest commodity in show business. It means people love him, which would seem normal to anyone who hasn't been keeping up with the media since 1998 — but is probably quite a shift in gears for those who were have been affected by the actor's affiliation with Scientology and couch jumping.

And as morbid as it may be, the actor's divorce isn't exactly working against his popularity. The timing of the announcement that Katie Holmes had filed was particularly conducive to Cruise-directed sympathies, as the news came only days before his fiftieth birthday. A slew of pieces "promoting" Cruise have hit the Internet, in places like The Huffington Post (at least in some aspects) and Jehovas-Witness.net. Many people are taking Cruise's side — going on what limited knowledge they have of the personal affairs between he and Holmes, but taking his side nonetheless.

The past few years of obtaining the "crazy celebrity" image be damned; Maverick is getting back in everybody's good graces. And with projects like Oblivion on the horizon and ideas like Top Gun 2 and Mission: Impossible 5 being tossed around, he doesn't look to be falling from this high point any time soon.