Tom Cruise will not be content to take off for the ISS and shoot a film there. According to the declarations of the president of Universal Pictures, he will even make a spacewalk, a very risky operation and until then reserved for professional astronauts.
Tom Cruise, from pilot to astronaut
This is a new project and necessarily very exciting. Unprecedented, exciting, and dangerous, since this is the film that Doug Liman and Tom Cruise have to shoot partly in space, since the ISS station. Production is slated to take place in 2023, and while it will mostly be shot on earth, some of its footage will be filmed in the International Space Station. To date, the allocated budget would be $200 millionwith an estimated salary of between 30 and 60 million dollars for Tom Cruise.
For the moment, no title nor really details on the scenario of this film produced by Universal Pictures in collaboration with the NASA and SpaceX. But we already know that Tom Cruise will play an anonymous person to whom life has not really smiled, and who finds himself the only one who can save humanity. And to do this, heading to space. In a recent interview granted to the BBC, Donna Langley, president of Universal Pictures gave additional information on this subject.
The production plans a spacewalk
Shooting a feature film in the ISS is already a major feat. But Universal Pictures does not intend to stop there. Indeed, the plan disclosed by Donna Langley is to film a spacewalk, that is, out of the space station. A complex and very demanding operation, which only professional astronauts have accomplished so far. If this release takes place for Doug Liman’s film, it will be a historic first time for a “civilian”.
Tom Cruise takes us into space. It takes the world into space. That’s the plan. We have a big project in development with Tom, and that’s exactly what’s planned. Send a rocket to the space station and spin around and hopefully accomplish the first civilian spacewalk out of the space station.
In other words, doing what we see in the introduction to Gravitybut really do it – and obviously avoid the dramatic outcome of George Clooney and Sandra Bullock’s exit in Alfonso Cuarón’s film.
Was this idea of an extra-vehicular outing planned from the start of the project’s development, or is it a response to Russia, which took the lead by also shooting its film in the ISS in 2021? Difficult to determine, but it is certain that given the complexity of an astronaut’s spacewalk, the one planned with Tom Cruise will be historic.
