Five years ago, we reported that Tom Cruise, ever-ambitious, had set a big milestone for himself: He and his frequent director Doug Liman were going to make an actual movie in actual space, where everything would probably go fine, and he would probably not become the first major Hollywood star to die in low-Earth orbit. (We might have, uh, phrased it slightly differently at the time.) Now, though, a report from Page Six suggests that damn dirty terrestrial politics may have gotten in the way of Cruise’s ambitions to absolutely die, on camera, in space make a movie outside Earth’s atmosphere.
See, anybody wanting to make a movie in space (at least American space, we guess) has got to do so with the approval of NASA, which means, ultimately, the approval of the sitting United States president. Which means, in turn, that Cruise would almost certainly have to personally ask Donald Trump for a favor. Which he has apparently been reticent to pick up the phone and do.
We should note that Page Six, which quotes “an insider familiar with the filmmakers,” tends to be both extremely gossip-y and overly credulous, so you’ll want to take the whole thing with a grain of salt. The issue, in their telling, isn’t that Cruise is necessarily personally opposed to Trump, though, with the actor having adopted one of Hollywood’s most studied poses of political indifference for decades at this point. The issue is that Cruise is apparently so apolitical that even asking Trump to help him get into orbit would be seen as too political, given how divisive both the man’s presidencies have been. (That or, as Page Six also notes, he doesn’t enjoy the many public comments Trump has made over the years when meeting actual Air Force fighter pilots, telling them they’re both taller and better looking than Cruise.)
Do we truly stand at the limits of what one actor can do to slip the surly bonds of Earth and touch the face of God before, like, getting hit by a satellite and exploding? It’s depressing to imagine that something as petty as politics could get in the way of these dreams. (Liman, for the record, talked about this all obliquely back in September of 2025; at the time, he was using a lot of “if” language about the possibility of making a movie in space, so a lot of the heat has definitely bled out of the project.) Cruise is, after all, 62 now: He’s got, what, 30 years before he’s in terrible danger of dying planet-side instead?
