Skip to main content

Tom Cruise and Edge of Tomorrow director team up again for Luna Park

Mission: Impossible 6
Featureflash / Shutterstock.com
Tom Cruise is set to co-direct sci-fi film Luna Park with Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman according to The Hollywood Reporter. Cruise will likely also star in the feature, which tells the story of rebellious scientists who builds a spaceship to attempt to travel to the moon and steal an energy source.

Liman’s experience working with Cruise on last year’s summer blockbuster Edge of Tomorrow likely convinced him to work with the acclaimed actor/filmmaker again. “[Making movies is] not a business,” said Liman to Esquire on working with Cruise. “We make movies because we love movies, and I don’t think there’s anybody out there who loves movies more than Tom Cruise. We love movies like Edge of Tomorrow. It’s why we go to the movies, and it’s why we make movies.”

In addition to the getting Cruise on board, Liman is no doubt excited to finally see any progress on his passion project. Paramount initially gave Luna Park the green light in 2011, with Chris Evans and Andrew Garfield starring, before it was shelved due to funding issues. The film’s newest push, also with Paramount, has a better chance to come to fruition considering that Cruise (and all his Hollywood might) is now involved.

It’s unclear who will write the script, but Indie Wire notes that the project previously had a slew of screenwriters linked to the project, including John Hamburg (I Love You, Man), Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down), and Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days of Future Past).

Don’t expect Luna Park to hit the theaters soon, though. Cruise has his hands full: he’ll shoot Jack Reacher 2 this fall and Mission: Impossible 6 next year. The in-demand movie star also just finished production on another Lima project, Mena, a true story about an undercover CIA agent who fronts as a drug smuggling pilot.

Chris Leo Palermino
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Chris Leo Palermino is a music, tech, business, and culture journalist based between New York and Boston. He also contributes…
Top Gun: Maverick review: Tom Cruise’s superior sequel
Tom Cruise looking stern in Top Gun: Maverick.

Faced with the cockiest flyboy in the history of naval aviation, Rear Adm. Chester "Hammer" Cain (Ed Harris) does not mince words. “Your kind is headed for extinction,” he tells the one and only Pete "Maverick" Mitchell. The admiral is talking about the obsolescence of fighter pilots in an age when bombs are dropped remotely from a strip mall outside Las Vegas. But he’s also speaking, in a metatextual manner, about the legend playing this legend: Hollywood’s aging but ageless golden boy Tom Cruise, pushing 60 but still climbing into cockpits  at a time when his “kind” — the movie star who’s a draw no matter the movie — has indeed been added to the endangered species list.

Those kind of winks are common in so-called legacy sequels, a very self-conscious strain of modern franchise continuation. Yet there’s scarcely a hint of irony in Top Gun: Maverick, a decades-later follow-up to one of the most anomalous hits of the 1980s. Early in the film, Cruise whips a tarp off that old motorcycle, the one he rode around back in ’86, and the moment is so glowingly awestruck, you half expect it to be accompanied by a 21-gun salute. This is a movie deeply in love with its title character, and with the movie star reprising that role, and maybe even with the fantasy of America it’s reviving.

Read more
Top Gun: Maverick trailer sends Tom Cruise back in the air
Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick.

In 1986, the original Top Gun helped firmly establish Tom Cruise as a movie star. And unlike many icons from the '80s, Cruise has maintained that status and avoided the direct-to-video phase of his career. Now, Cruise is revisiting the franchise that started it all in Top Gun: Maverick. The film was actually finished three years ago, but it has faced numerous pandemic-related delays. Now that the new trailer has arrived, there are finally clear skies ahead for the sequel.

The trailer picks up with Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) nearly 30 years after the original film. While Maverick's peers have gone on to bigger things, he remains a captain and a test pilot simply so he can keep flying missions. Maverick finds himself back in the Top Gun program while teaching a new generation of pilots the skills they will need to survive in hostile skies. But at least one of the cadets will remind Maverick of his darkest hour, when his friend, Nick "Goose" Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards), was killed in the original movie.

Read more
NASA is working with Tom Cruise to film a movie in space
Mission: Impossible 6

It looks like Tom Cruise may soon be going to space, according to a tweet by NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.

Bridenstine said the space agency will be working with Cruise "on a film aboard the Space Station."

Read more