Most actors slow down as they get older. If they do action, they eventually pivot to…not action. Not Tom Cruise! He’s doing life pretty much in reverse: Having done mostly dramas and such (and the occasional Top Gun or Days of Thunder) in his youth, he now exclusively puts his life at risk to entertain. A few years back he announced he’d found the ultimate death-defying dare: He’d go to space with Elon Musk, all to make a movie. He’s still into the idea, though it’s unclear if the Twitter guy is still involved.
As per Variety, Cruise gave a brief but vaguely optimistic update about his outer space movie, and it sounds like it’s vaguely going well. “We’ve been working on it diligently and we’ll see where we go,” he told the publication at the New York City premiere of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.
Absent from Cruise’s terse update are the words “Elon Musk.” Back in 2020, when he was just the Tesla/SpaceX guy — and when he was “only” worth $38.7 billion before accruing far more than that, then losing a chunk of that over the whole Twitter fiasco that keeps getting worse — it was reported that Musk was teaming up with Cruise to make world’s first action movie in space. He very well still could be involved, or maybe he’s a little distracted getting ripped so he doesn’t get beaten up by the guy who co-created Facebook.
Since announcing the outer space action movie three years ago, there has been progress. It now has a studio (Universal), a budget (about $200 million), and a director: Doug Liman, who teamed with Cruise on Edge of Tomorrow and American Made.
Of course, it will still be some time before Cruise even heads to the cosmos. After all, he has another big project on his plate: He still has to finish filming Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two, which is on pause so they can promote Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. According to director Christopher McQuarrie, they’re not messing around.
“We finish this tour, and on our way back to the U.K. we stop to scout along the way. We hit the ground running as soon as we get back,” McQuarrie informed Variety. “I get two days of vacation between here and Tokyo and I’m back on.”
But perhaps by the time Cruise is done swimming with actual sharks or eating pufferfish or going to grad school or whatever life-threatening things he does in Dead Reckoning Part Two, he’ll realize that going to outer space just to make a movie is kind of dangerous.
(Via Variety)