Tom Cruise has made a name for himself in recent years for his death-defying stunts in action movies. We’ve seen him climb the Burj Khalifa, hang off the side of a plane, and even pilot a jet in Top Gun 2. Still, there’s one stunt he’s not managed to pull off yet. He’s never filmed in space. Of course, being Tom Cruise, he’s desperate to film a movie in space and had actually started planning an untitled new movie that would allow him to pull off this out of this world stunt.
Had Cruise managed this extraordinary feat, he’d have been the first actor to ever make a movie in space. Unfortunately, though, it looks like he’s going to get beaten by a new Russian movie called The Challenger. Yes, the Russians have won the space race once again, with Collider reporting that director Klim Shipenko and his crew are ready to blast off on October 5.
Shipenko and his crew have spent the better part of the year training in Moscow at the Yuri Gagarin Center for Cosmonaut Training and got their approval to shoot on September 16. Now Shipenko might not be able to set off on October 5, space travel is one of the few things that literally is rocket science, and many things can go wrong. If the weather’s not right, or they have a technical problem, then the launch may be delayed.
Still, it’s unlikely that Cruise will be able to make it up into the howling void of space before The Challenge crew. He’s still filming the next instalment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, and after that, he’ll be busy promoting Top Gun 2. Both SpaceX and NASA have said they’ll help Cruise make the movie, but he’ll need a studio to foot its reported $200 million budget.
The man funding The Challenge has actually shared his disappointment that Cruise won’t be able to film with them. “We certainly would have preferred arriving at the International Space Station at the same time with Tom Cruise,” Channel One CEO Konstantin Ernst said in a statement to Variety, “we would have enjoyed shooting the film together much better.”
The Challenge will tell the story of a Russian doctor who travels to the International Space Station to save the life of an astronaut. It will star veteran actor Yulia Peresild, who won the part after a countrywide audition process last year.