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Before Tom Cruise wrapped filming on the Mission: Impossible series, fans were already trying to figure out how the thrill-seeking actor would get his next adrenaline fix. Would he jump off the world's tallest oil rig just for fun? Become the first blindfolded spelunker? Pick a fight with those direwolf clones everybody's flipping out about? Well, the answer is none of those, actually, but at the same time, it's not going to shock you just how ridiculous the actor's next project may be.

If all goes according to plan, the Top Gun star may be headed to outer space to film a movie.

The story recently came up in a discussion with Doug Liman, published by Deadline. In case you don't know, Liman is the director of a host of popular action thrillers and has teamed with Cruise more than once - most recently, in the 2017 scifi shocker Edge of Tomorrow. Liman was just at Venice’s Film Festival Immersive Competition, where he was promoting his immersive thriller Asteroids, starring Hailee Steinfeld, Rhenzy Feliz, DK Metcalf, Ron Perlman, Frieda Pinto and Leon Mandel and filmed to be viewed in a VR headset. Asked about his future projects, Liman said he "was also planning to go shoot a movie in outer space with Tom Cruise" down the line.

Naturally, his interviewer wanted to know more.

"I’ve just finished [Asteroids]," Liman answered, "So I’m now processing what next and what I learned, part of it will be how the audience reacts to it. You’d rather I give you more concrete answers but you’re getting me totally raw… I don’t know where it leaves me. I know I want to do more in space… I am more excited about this idea of characters who have no business of going into space after making this. In the way, I was excited after The Bourne Identity."

Yes, what really excites the American Made director isn't the fact that it require an actual craft capable of exiting Earth's atmosphere in order to film, but that that craft would help tell a story that no one else has before. Actually, Liman made it very clear that, despite the wildness of the idea, he was not at all looking for just the novelty of a movie being filmed off-planet.

"Our goal is too make something great," said the director, "A lot of people are trying to do gimmicky things like, 'Oh, it’s in space.' I’m not interested in doing something that’s a just promotional gimmick. I want to make a film that people watch in a hundred years when maybe there’s hundreds of movies shot in outer space and there’s nothing special about it being in outer space. That’s the goal of everything I do. With Swingers, it’s very meaningful to me that lots of people who watch it weren’t even born when it premiered here."

An ambitious idea for sure, but let's be clear here - as of this writing, the Liman/Cruise offworld collaboration has not officially been given the greenlight. In fact, as Deadline mentions, the project has been in the gesticulation phase since 2020. And the way Liman talks about it, it's still a bit more dream than reality.

"If I ever shoot a movie in outer space," Liman concluded, "The question will be what could I do that you couldn’t do on Earth that makes for a great piece of entertainment, that’s better than if you didn’t do it it space. Again, its also about technology and storytelling… you can run a line from Swingers all the way through to this potential film in outer space."

Huh. Now that's a path to the final frontier we never thought we'd have to consider.

Watch Tom Cruise scooch ever close to his own doom with Popverse's Mission: Impossible watch order.