Tom Cruise Plans to Be The First Person to Film an Action Movie in Actual Outer Space
Tom Cruise loves to do crazy stunts. Despite being one of Hollywood’s biggest stars for four decades now, Cruise has made it his mission (pun intended) to perform a lot of his own stunts, and many of them have been full-tilt bananas. Holding onto the side of a plane as it took off? Check. Free-climbed the tallest building in the world? Check. Piloted his own helicopter during a fantastically insane chase in the last Mission: Impossible movie? Yup. Cruise has been doing this for so long that his collaborator and ace stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood, who last worked with Cruise on Mission: Impossible – Fallout says of him, “You’ve got to know the man to be able to understand him. There’s nothing ego-driven about him at all. He just loves his job and wants to be good at it, so the audience is engaged and stays with the character.”
Which brings us to yesterday’s news about Cruise’s latest death-defying mission to keep the audience engaged—he wants to head into actual, literal outer space to film an action movie. Yes, this will be a cinematic first. Deadline reports that Cruise is teaming up with Elon Musk’s Space X and the folks at NASA to film an action movie in space. While the details are scarce, Deadline reports that Cruise is in the early stages of planning, but it would be very Tom Cruise to be the first man to film a feature in outer space. There have been plenty of incredible films set in space (we particularly loved last year’s Ad Astra, starring Brad Pitt), and many even that have utilized zero gravity to film scenes, but none that have been actually shot in space.
This wouldn’t be part of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Deadline reports, and so far no studio is attached. But the man who has performed stunts 123 stories up in a skyscraper, done “halo jumps” from 25,000 feet up, and learned how to pilot a helicopter all to make the final action set piece in Fallout feel as real as possible is as safe a bet as any human alive to be able to pull this off.
Cruise was in the midst of filming Mission: Impossible – 7 when the COVID-19 pandemic halted production. For now, we can dream of a future when the pandemic is over, movie theaters are open, and Cruise is in outer space filming his next movie.
Featured image: Tom Cruise plays Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick from Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Credit: Scott Garfield. © 2019 Paramount Pictures Corporation.
