Director Doug Liman Will Film Tom Cruise in Outer Space
Back in early May word got out that Tom Cruise—of course it would be Tom Cruise—was going to be the first person ever to shoot a feature film in outer space. Now we know who will be going on this mission with Cruise, his longtime collaborator Doug Liman, who directed him in Edge of Tomorrow and American Made. Cruise and Liman will be teaming up with Elon Musk’s Space X and NASA to pull this off. (Incidentally, today marks the first time SpaceX will be running the launch of two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station today aboard their SpaceX Falcon 9 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.)
This project is still in the early stages, so there aren’t any plot details to share, but Deadline reports that this isn’t some pie in the sky notion they’ve dashed off. Cruise and Liman hatched this plan together, and Liman wrote the first draft of the script and will be producing the film alongside Cruise. Both of these guys are pilots, and “bonded over an adventurous spirit,” Deadline‘s Mike Fleming Jr. reports.
How Cruise, Liman, and their SpaceX and NASA collaborators pull this off will be the subject of many feature stories of the future. Training cast and crew to not only make it into outer space but also perform is going to be a huge challenge. We already know that Cruise loves a challenge—and perform some genuinely crazy stunts. These include holding onto the side of a plane as it took off, and piloting his own helicopter during a fantastically insane chase in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. As Cruise’s longtime collaborator and ace stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood says of him, “He just loves his job and wants to be good at it, so the audience is engaged and stays with the character.”
It seems the logical next step in Cruise’s mission to keep the audience engaged requires leaving Earth.
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.
