One of the world’s biggest movie stars is officially expanding his reach in the galaxy.
NASA confirmed Tuesday that Tom Cruise is planning to shoot a movie, at least in part, on the International Space Station. It will be the first narrative feature film to be shot in outer space.
“NASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station,” NASA administrator Jim Bridentsine wrote on Twitter. “We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA’s ambitious plans a reality.”
Deadline reported earlier Tuesday that Cruise was teaming up with Elon Musk’s Space X and NASA for the untitled action-adventure movie, which appears to be in the early stages of development. No studio, director, writer or plot details have been announced for the project.
According to SlashFilm, Cruise actually discussed doing a film in space with director James Cameron around the time of 2000′s “Mission: Impossible II.”
“I actually talked to [Cruise] about doing a space film in space, about 15 years ago,” Cameron said in 2018. “I had a contract with the Russians in 2000 to go to the International Space Station and shoot a high-end 3D documentary there. And I thought, ‘S---, man, we should just make a feature.’ I said, ‘Tom, you and I, we’ll get two seats on the Soyuz, but somebody’s gotta train us as engineers.’ Tom said, ‘No problem, I’ll train as an engineer.’ We had some ideas for the story, but it was still conceptual.”
Deadline reports the new project is not part of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, which helped Cruise earn a reputation for death-defying stunts. He hung from the side of a plane 5,000 feet in the air for “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation," scaled a 123-story tall Dubai skyscraper in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol," and even broke his ankle while filming “Mission: Impossible — Fallout.”
Cruise, 57, was filming “Mission: Impossible 7” earlier this year, but production was put on hold in February due to the coronavirus pandemic. Scenes were scheduled to be shot in Italy, which has now seen more than 210,000 cases of COVID-19 and over 29,000 deaths.
Another Cruise sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick,” pushed back its release date from this summer to December 2020 as movie theaters remain closed due to coronavirus.