Tom Cruise's in-development space movie has proven to be mission impossible. The actor's history-making project with Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman has reportedly been scrapped.
According to Page Six, sources say that the movie reached a dead-end due to Cruise's reluctance to ask the President for permission to work with NASA. "From what I understand, they would need NASA coordination to do the movie, and supposedly Tom Cruise did not want to ask Donald Trump for a favor," an insider told the publication. "You’d need permission from the federal government. Tom didn’t want to ask for political reasons."
Back in 2020, it was announced that Cruise would be working on the first narrative movie shot in space, with a NASA administrator confirming that the actor would be shooting on board the International Space Station.
Updates were few and far between until 2022, when Universal Pictures boss Donna Langley confirmed that "Tom Cruise is taking us to space. He’s taking the world to space."
"We have a great project in development with Tom, that does contemplate him doing just that," Langley said at the time. "Taking a rocket up to the space station and shooting and hopefully being the first civilian to do a spacewalk outside of the space station."
The untitled movie would have seen Cruise play "a down-on-his-luck guy who finds himself in the position of being the only person who could save Earth." If nothing else, we're pretty gutted that we'll never see Cruise do a spacewalk.
Next up for the Mission: Impossible star is a currently untitled movie from The Revenant director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Not much is known about the film yet, except that he'll lead a stacked ensemble cast that includes Jesse Plemons, Emma D'Arcy, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, and Michael Stuhlbarg.
Cruise and Iñárritu's new movie arrives in theaters on October 2, 2026. For more on what to watch, check out our guide to the rest of 2026's biggest upcoming movies.
