More details have arrived from Universal's impending outer space movie with Tom Cruise. Cruise began his career as an A-list celebrity straddling the line between comedy, drama, and action in films like Risky Business, Top Gun, and Rain Man, eventually rising to become the highest-grossing movie star in history. His recent efforts have mostly been big-budget action extravaganzas with worldwide appeal, especially the entries in the long-running action film franchise Mission: Impossible, which first featured Tom Cruise as superspy Ethan Hunt in 1996.
Over the course of the last few years, Tom Cruise's journey into space has been a captivating drama. In May 2020, just a few months into the global pandemic, it was announced that the actor would be shooting a movie in space. However, his first sojourn to the stars, which was originally planned for October 2021, was delayed, and a Russian film crew beat him to the punch, spending 12 days in orbit shooting scenes from the upcoming movie The Challenge.
Per Variety, a few details about the upcoming project that will reteam Tom Cruise with Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman and Mission: Impossible 7 director Christopher McQuarrie have been revealed. The filmmakers are currently making progress on the script for the film, which will feature Cruise as an everyman who discovers he alone has the ability to save the planet from an unspecified threat. The film will likely be shot after McQuarrie and Cruise complete production on Mission: Impossible 8, and will shoot some scenes on the International Space Station. Although it was rumored that the entire film would be shot in space, most of the other scenes will be filmed on Earth.
Considering Cruise's ever-impressive commitment to doing his own stunts, shooting scenes in space is the natural next step. For his stint in the increasingly action-packed Mission: Impossible franchise, Cruise has continued to up the ante on stunts, which have included running down the side of the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol and being strapped to an airplane flying at 5,000 feet in Rogue Nation.
Unfortunately, Tom Cruise's other commitments have prevented this project from becoming an immediate priority. However, it is certain that whatever he does if and when he leaves the Earth's surface will be a dazzling spectacle on an entirely new level. The actor is a reliable source of death-defying feats that make his human-sized accomplishments feel as big and brassy as the massive blockbusters films around him.
Source: Variety