By the time the still-untitled eighth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise arrives, star Tom Cruise will have been playing Ethan Hunt for well over two decades. That’s an awful long time for any one actor to be playing a character in a movie franchise and especially in this current climate, where everything under the sun is being rebooted.
But with Cruise now pushing 60, you’d think that it’d almost be time for him to start slowing down and maybe taking it a bit easy. Perhaps move into quieter dramas or even retire from acting altogether, right? Well, for almost anyone else, that’d probably be the case, but this being Tom Cruise, he’s decided to push things even further. And the only way to do that given all the wild, high-octane stunts he’s already performed across the Mission: Impossible series is by going into space.
That’s right, Deadline is reporting tonight that the Top Gun star is teaming up with NASA and Elon Musk’s Space X to shoot the first narrative feature film – an action adventure flick, obviously – in space. It’s not part of the Mission: Impossible franchise and no studio is attached just yet, but the project is definitely beginning to come together. And that’s where the details end.
At this early, early sage, Deadline unfortunately doesn’t have anything else to share. But this is obviously a hugely ambitious movie and one that likely won’t materialize for a long, long time – if at all. After all, we imagine there are many, many complications when it comes to getting something like this made and it might just be too difficult in the end. But it’s certainly something that Tom Cruise is actively pursuing and we can only hope he ends up pulling it off.