Say goodbye to Tom Cruise, everybody. It’s just a matter of time now before his frozen body is left drifting off into the unknown, an eternal testament to the folly of man and our species’ constant hunger for bigger and bolder movie stunts. Future generations will look upon him in awe, wondering why such a handsome 50-something-year-old man was released from the gentle caress of Mother Earth’s gravity and left to float alone like a discarded plastic bag in the endless black ocean of eternity. We’ll be long gone by then, forgotten by the pages of history ourselves, but we will still know the answer to that question. Only we will remember what happened to Tom Cruise, how he based his belief system around some interesting concepts, and how he dedicated his life to the most noble of all professions. He was a movie star, and he died in space making a movie. Look on his works, ye mighty, and jump up on Oprah’s couch.
Of course, that hasn’t happened yet, and we’re going to look especially ghoulish if it does happen, but Tom Cruise is going to try and make a movie in space and we’re not extremely confident in the project’s viability… by which we mean survivability. According to Deadline, Cruse is in the “early stages” of some kind of action movie that will be filmed in outer space—the first narrative feature film to do that, naturally, because it’s fucking bananas—with both NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX involved in some capacity. Deadline says it’s not going to be a Mission: Impossible movie and no studio is currently attached, which makes sense because it’s fucking bananas, but the report is adamant that the movie “is real.”
This news comes as Cruise has continuously increased the risk factor in the stunts for his Mission: Impossible movies, including climbing the Burj Khalifa, holding onto a plane during takeoff, and shattering his ankle while trying to leap across rooftops. In fact, the one threat that Cruise wasn’t willing to stare down was the coronavirus, with production on the seventh Mission: Impossible movie being suspended in February (which came before production was suspended on literally everything).
Hey, speaking of the virus, here’s some stuff that Elon Musk—one of the people who evidently thinks it’s a good idea to let Tom Cruise make a movie in space—has recently said about it, courtesy of our friends at Gizmodo. Oh, also, we should’ve made a “Space Oddity” reference at some point in this story. “Ground control to Major Tom,” his name is Tom, it was right there. Damn it.