We learnt yesterday that Tom Cruise is simply not satisfied with defying gravity on Earth and is now trying to move his bizarre stunts into space. It sounded like an outrageous idea that seemed almost too good to be true. Alas, this is no longer April and the jokes dried up a long time ago with COVID-19 and this is all actually happening. In fact, we now have more details on exactly where in space this movie is going to be filmed, as Variety is reporting that along with Elon Musk’s Space X company, NASA is also involved and the film will not only be set in the International Space Station but filmed on it as well.
At the spry age of 57, Tom Cruise still feels eager to fulfil a lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut and sees this movie as a chance to finally achieve that dream. Or he truly does have a death wish after all, but it seems there is no stopping Cruise as he takes on arguably the most ambitious project of his career.
Either that, or someone forgot to tell him that with anti-gravity rooms and visual effects and you don’t actually need to be in space to do this, but since when has Cruise used visual effects to cover up his real-life stunts?
While we still don’t have any plot details for this planned new film, the article also confirmed that this movie will not form part of his Mission: Impossible franchise and will be something original. There are no other cast members or a director attached to this project as yet, although given all the people that would need to go through space training to be aboard the cramped ISS, it would need to be a very limited camera crew and require long term commitment. Or possibly be filmed by the cast members themselves
It’s hard to imagine where Cruise’s career could go to from here, but if he pulls this off, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see him star in a sequel to Matt Damon’s The Martian, only this time he literally is stuck on Mars and has to keep himself alive by pulling off even more remarkable stunts at the age of 70.
With Tom Cruise, anything is possible.
Last Updated: May 6, 2020
HvR
May 6, 2020 at 09:30
On the anti-gravity special effects, something that irritated me to no end was non documentary “science-heavy” movies over the last decade was how bad low/no gravity environments were done on film.
This movie will off course only happen once SpaceX Crew Dragon had been properly verified (last verification flight and first crewed flight taking off in about 2 weeks) and SpaceX have fulfilled all their NASA-ISS contract obligations. So probably not before towards the end of 2021.