Anne Hathaway to help Tom Cruise into the car for Days Of Thunder sequel

Given how much emphasis always gets put on Cruise’s movie star status—to the point that a recent trailer for his upcoming Alejandro G. Iñárritu film Digger amounted, almost literally, to two straight minutes of “Hey, you like Tom Cruise, right?”—it’s actually a little surprising that he’s sharing billing in the movie’s big press announcement. Hathaway is having a pretty productive summer, though, having starred in both The Odyssey and The End Of Oak Street,  so someone clearly thinks she has enough star power at this point to balance out Cruise. (Our alternative theory, meanwhile, is that they just needed someone else to stand in the press photo to obscure a visual reminder, printed on the car shown, that Cruise’s character name in this franchise is “Cole Trickle”—which has always sounded to us like a urinary disease that afflicts people who’ve spent too long down in a mine.)

No plot details for the sequel have been announced, although we did get character descriptions: The 64-year-old Cruise will, of course, be returning as his once-hotshot NASCAR driver, while Hathaway will play “a team owner and engineer.” Jonathan Levine, whose resumé is mostly filled with comedies like 50/50 and Long Shot, will direct; it’s an interesting choice, given that nothing in Levine’s filmography suggests the kind of technical rigor required to keep Cruise alive on a film set full of fast-moving traffic that you just know he’s going to want to run out and play in.