“Tom Cruise is taking us to space. He’s taking the world to space. That’s the plan,” Universal Filmed Entertainment Group chairwoman Donna Langley recently confirmed to the BBC. “We have a great project in development with Tom, that does contemplate him doing just that. Taking a rocket up to the space station and shooting and hopefully being the first civilian to do a spacewalk outside of the space station.”
The blast-off portion of the program will only be a small snippet of the Doug Liman-directed film, which “actually [mostly] takes place on earth, and then the character needs to go up to space to save the day.” Langley describes Cruise’s character as “a down-on-his-luck guy who finds himself in the position of being the only person who could save Earth.”
The project has long been gestating, first reported as a possibility in 2020 as a collaboration between Cruise, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and NASA. At the time, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted a confirmation (per Deadline) of the organization’s involvement, adding, “We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA’s ambitious plans a reality.” Somewhat ominous, no? What intergalactic plans is NASA cooking up over there? One might recall the words of space traveler William Shatner: “I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.”
