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To infinity: Tom Cruise to become the first actor to film a movie in space

Tom Cruise is firing his jet engines, having been announced as the first actor to ever film a movie in space.

The Hollywood veteran is currently collaborating with film production company Universal, who announced yesterday their intentions to send Cruise to the stratosphere as part of an upcoming project. While details of the film’s plot remain scarce, Universal has revealed that some scenes will be shot on the International Space Station, where Cruise will become “the first civilian to do a spacewalk outside of the space station,” Universal Chairman Donna Langley said. 

I think Tom Cruise is taking us to space. He’s taking the world to space,” Langley added. Marking both the first-ever outer-space film and the first civilian spacewalk, the upcoming movie will be directed by Doug Liman, who has elsewhere helmed the action flicks The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith and the Cruise-starring Edge of Tomorrow. Further elaborating on the project, Langley said much of the film will remain earth-bound, but will feature a sequence in which “the character [goes] up to space to save the day.”

Credit: CDT

Langley continued: “That’s the plan. We have a great project in development with Tom…Taking a rocket up to the Space Station and shooting.” While usurping Buzz Lightyear appears to be quite the feat, Cruise has long been known for his ambitious stunts, having completed much of his own body work on films like The Mummy and the Mission Impossible franchise, the latter of which led to a broken ankle on the set of Fallout in 2018.

Whispers of Cruise’s space film first arose in 2020, when NASA confirmed that they were training the actor to be deemed space-ready. Then, in January of this year, news broke that a studio for the film was being built in collaboration with construction service, Axom, who revealed plans to launch the studio space-side by 2024.  

Cruise’s interstellar film marks the most recent addition to his sky-bound filmography, having enjoyed astronomical (pun intended) success in the wake of fellow aerial film, Top Gun: Maverick. The reboot of the high-flying 1986 original landed in theatres this year, and promptly became 2022’s highest-grossing movie and Cruise’s first-ever billion-dollar project.