Tom Cruise is making an action-adventure sci-fi movie and he's apparently hooking up with Elon Musk's SpaceX to shoot the film in space. Yes, really, and NASA is on board too.
The project will serve as the first-ever movie shot in space, but with such a monumental undertaking, it didn't take all that much to get the film green-lit. According to Deadline, all Cruise had to do was engage in an “exuberant Zoom call” with director Doug Liman, Christopher McQuarrie, and PJ van Sandwijk, and Universal Pictures was on board. The film was pitched without a script, leading to an estimated budget of $200 million.
News of the picture broke in May, as NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstein confirmed the extraterrestrial enterprise in a subsequent tweet. For the movie, NASA will be sending the Mission Impossible actor up to the International Space Station because, as Bridenstein puts it, the organization needs “popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make [NASA's] ambitious plans a reality.”
Deadline previously reported that Cruise's next ridiculous stunt is not for another Mission: Impossible movie — a franchise that has seen him hanging from helicopters, jet planes, scaling the Burj Khalifa, and leaping from rooftops. However, McQuarrie, who worked with Cruise on the Mission: Impossible films, will be the project's story advisor and a producer alongside Cruise, Liman, and van Sandwijk. The film has not been given a title, nor a projected release date, as Liman is currently writing the script.
SpaceX is yet to confirm its attachment to the film, and while it's also not clear how well Musk and Cruise know each other (though the fact that they might be pals isn't hugely surprising), the 57-year-old actor's appreciation of the Tesla CEO can be traced back to 2013 when he posted the below tweet.
Updates to follow.
