It was announced last year that Tom Cruise will soon be making an action-adventure movie set in space. Even though fans are used to seeing the actor pull off hair-raising stunts without CGI or greenscreens, the idea that Cruise would actually film the movie in space seemed difficult to believe. Filmmaker Doug Liman, who will be helming the project, confirmed that the movie is definitely happening, but the production team had to get creative when it came to getting insurance for the project.

"From the first conversations that we've had about the film... how you ensure it has been a central part of the conversations. So, we wouldn't be talking about this movie if we hadn't figured out a way to navigate the insurance component. So we have navigated it, but there would not have been a conversation about this movie without figuring out the insurance... it's the same thing in [Liman's new movie] Locked Down, one of the first conversations was about insurance, because of the [global health emergency]... You can't make a movie without having an insurance conversation. And [whether] you're talking about going to outer space, [or] you're talking about shooting in London in the heart of the [emergency], you know, insurance is gonna dictate whether that actually is possible."

Universal has already agreed to fund the ambitious movie with a $200 million check. According to Liman, filming should start in the next year or two. Although the movie does not yet have an official title, it is likely that Liman, who will also write the screenplay, already has at least a spec script ready.

While many were taken aback by Cruise's sudden desire to go into space to shoot a movie, the actor had actually been thinking about the idea for a long time. Back in 2018, while promoting his latest Mission: Impossible film, Cruise had been jokingly asked if his lead character from the franchise, Ethan Hunt, might be going into space for his next adventure. Instead of laughing the idea off, Cruise had revealed it was definitely something he had been considering.

"It's like how do we do it? It's the mechanics of getting it there. How do you build a sequence there and how long can we have that sequence? Because if I went up and just dropped, how do you put that into the structure of a screenplay of a mission? It's just not there yet. We talk about a lot of things and some of the things we talk about end up in later missions. There's a lot of stuff that [Christopher McQuarrie] and I talked about since [Mission: Impossible] Ghost Protocol that ended up in Rogue [Nation] or stuff that we talked about in Rogue that ended up in this movie."

It seems the technology has finally caught up to Cruise's ambitions, with a little help from NASA and Elon Musk's SpaceX. Hopefully, the actor's daring plan for shooting a film in space will go smoothly and show the path for future movies set outside of Earth. This news originated at Collider