It looks like we might have liftoff on Tom Cruise’s space movie in the not-too-distant future. Donna Langley, chairman of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, recently confirmed to BBC News that the studio is still adamant on sending the Top Gun star beyond our atmosphere, making him “the first civilian to do a spacewalk outside of the space station.”
Cruise and Doug Liman pitched the out-of-this-world film to Langley on Zoom over the pandemic; according to the chairman, the untitled project “actually takes place on Earth, and then the character needs to go up to space to save the day.” To get this big idea off the ground, Cruise plans to to take a rocket up to the International Space Station — the largest modular space station in low Earth orbit.
Cruise’s space movie expedition has been in the works for quite a while now, and a production date is still very much up in the air. To add a little more drama into the mix, however, a Russian TV channel announced in December 2020 that they, too, were also aiming to shoot a movie in space, prompting a second Space Race of sorts. Cruise and Liman’s film was initially announced to have a whopping $200 million price tag; we’ll just have to wait to see if it’s worth it.
We last saw Cruise do his own stunts in this year’s Top Gun: Maverick. He’s also reportedly working on the script to an untitled song-and-dance musical film, in which he’s also set to star.
