It’s unlikely that Tom Cruise’s proposed outer-space movie will be lifting off from the launching pad anytime soon, due to the actor’s reluctance to get involved with President Trump in the permissions process.
The film, which Cruise hoped to make for Universal with his Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman, had been kicking around since 2020, but as an insider recently told Page Six in an exclusive interview: “From what I understand, they would need NASA coordination to do the movie, and supposedly Tom Cruise did not want to ask Donald Trump for a favor. You’d need permission from the federal government.”
The unidentified source claimed that the actor did not want to alienate his fans by dealing with the President. Earlier this year, Cruise had reportedly turned down a Kennedy Center honor from Trump, citing “scheduling conflicts.”
Former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, a Trump appointee, had earlier been open to the film being shot on the International Space Station. In a since-deleted tweet, Bridenstine had written: “NASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station! We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA’s ambitious plans a reality.”
Discussing the proposed film, Liman was quoted as saying “I’m more excited about going to space, not less… but our goal is to make something great. A lot of people are trying to do gimmicky things like, ‘Oh, it’s in space.’ I’m not interested in doing something that’s a just promotional gimmick. I want to make a film that people watch in a hundred years when maybe there’s hundreds of movies shot in outer space and there’s nothing special about it being in outer space. That’s the goal of everything I do.”
At the McDonald’s Impact Summit in November, Trump made Cruise the butt of his sarcasm when the President compared the actor to the bomber pilots who attacked Iran’s nuclear-enrichment sites, saying: “They looked like Tom Cruise. They really do. I don’t want to be a wise guy and say ‘But taller.’ I’m not gonna say that.” But he did.
Meanwhile, Cruise is busy with several other projects in the coming year, after having released The Final Reckoning, his latest movie in the Mission: Impossible franchise.
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