Russia Already Beat Tom Cruise To Filming On The ISS

With Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One now open in theaters, social media is in the middle of a Tom Cruise takeover.

Variety published a story yesterday about Cruise’s next project. No, not Dead Reckoning Part Two. The one after that. The project he and Edge of Tomorrow director, Doug Liman are planning to shoot in space.

The unnamed Universal project has an estimated budget of $200 million and the Liman/Cruise team plan to use that money to make Tom the first civilian to perform a spacewalk. We started hearing about this plan back in 2020 when the BBC reported that Cruise is planning to partner with NASA, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to get him up to The International Space Station.

Lofty goals (ha, see what I did there?) But if anyone has the drive, and the guts to pull this off, it’s Tom Cruise. The Space Race is still one that moves fast and, just like they did when they sent Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961, the Russians already beat us to it. According to this Politico report from March, a two-person team, Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer/director Anton Shkaplerov spent 12 days on the ISS in October of 2021 to film a movie called The Challenge.

Per IMDb

Cosmonaut Ivanov loses consciousness while the spacecraft is in flight. Doctors decide that it will be necessary to perform heart surgery right in zero gravity. Cardiac surgeon Zhenya Belyaeva, who does not have time to raise her three-year-old daughter, is preparing for the flight.

All things being even and history being repeatable, the Russian filmmakers didn’t get a spacewalk in. So, if Liman and Cruise pull off their plan we’ll still be one up on Russia as far as space exploration goes. Our hopes rest on you, Tom Cruise.

He probably loves that.