Space, the final frontier. It has captivated engineers, explorers, and filmmakers. Mankind has sent people into orbit and walked on the moon, but there are still many firsts to achieve. Now, Tom Cruise is poised to check off another item on that to-do list by going up into space and performing a spacewalk.
Coming off the soaring success of the latest Top Gun film, Cruise has reportedly reached out to Doug Liman, director of The Bourne Identity, with a movie plot that involves filming at the International Space Station (ISS). This plan comes with some ambitious steps to get done that’ll also be firsts in space exploration and filming.
Tom Cruise may be the first actor and civilian to walk in space
Meet Donna Langley, chairman of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group (UFEG). From this position, she has some inside details about an upcoming project led by Universal that would see a character played by Cruise going into space. Cruise and Liman actually pitched the new film to her during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic via Zoom, describing a plot that “actually takes place on earth, and then the character needs to go up to space to save the day.”
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To make this idea come to life, Cruise would be sent up on a rocket to the ISS. From there, he would do a spacewalk, which is anytime an astronaut goes outside of a vehicle into that endless void of weightlessness. So, Langley notes, this would make Cruise “the first civilian to do a spacewalk outside of the space station.”
What else is known so far
According to Variety, the currently untitled Tom Cruise space adventure has a budget of around $200 million. Traveling to the ISS is, after all, increasingly feasible – but still astronomically expensive. But Liman is all ears; after all, “When a producer proposes something crazy to you, like, let’s try to shoot a movie in outer space, and NASA and SpaceX sign on, and Tom Cruise signs on… you’re just a little bit more receptive.”
In contrast to this big price tag, Langley further teased that Cruise’s character is “a down-on-his-luck guy who finds himself in the position of being the only person who could save Earth.” Talk about starting from the bottom and working up to the top!