Back in May of 2020 came news that director Doug Liman and actor Tom Cruise were collaborating on a new feature film which would at least partially shoot in outer space. Updates on the film have been sporadic ever since, with reports that they were perhaps being hindered by trouble with production insurance, but last week brought the reveal that a full studio was being created for ventures just like this one. Now a new report reveals that this announcement of a space film studio was perhaps premature, and won’t even be what the Tom Cruise feature film is using as a location.
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According to Variety, Universal Pictures doesn’t yet have a script for the untitled movie but they expect production to begin next year and believe it will be Cruise’s next project after Mission: Impossible 8 wraps. The trade goes on to report that in actuality most of the movie will be filmed on Earth and only “partially shot on the International Space Station” with some “additional footage… to be shot on a rocket.” Surprisingly the new film will reportedly not be a science-fiction film but is described by the outlet as ” an action-adventure” film following the actor as “a down-on-his-luck guy who finds himself in the position of being the only person who could save Earth” (that’s a new one for him!).
The upcoming film will be a collaboration between Elon Musk‘s Space X and NASA, and production would take place aboard the International Space Station when they’re actually in space. According to a previous report from TMZ, a 2020 to 2023 manifest lists Cruise and Liman among the passengers on the International Space Station.
“From the first conversations that we’ve had about the film… how you insure it has been a central part of the conversations,” Liman told Collider last year. “So, we wouldn’t be talking about this movie if we hadn’t figured out a way to navigate the insurance component. So we have navigated it, but there would not have been a conversation about this movie without figuring out the insurance… You can’t make a movie without having an insurance conversation. And [whether] you’re talking about going to outer space, [or] you’re talking about shooting in London in the heart of the pandemic, you know, insurance is gonna dictate whether that actually is possible.”
What do you think Tom Cruise will be able to pull off filming in space that visual effects wouldn’t be able to handle safely on the ground?
