Tom Cruise’s SpaceX Movie Scrapped

Tom Cruise, who is known for his daring stunts in the “Mission: Impossible” movies, was set to carry out his daring mission in 2021.

The movie was announced in 2020 and sounded like the next logical venture of the Hollywood star stunt obsession: shoot a film in outer space, in cooperation with NASA and SpaceX, which reunites Cruise with his “Edge of Tomorrow” director Doug Liman helming the project. 

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine even tweeted that the agency was “excited” to work with Cruise on a film aboard the International Space Station, framing it as a way to inspire future engineers.

According to Page Six, the project has now been quietly scrapped for an extremely Earthbound reason: Donald Trump. 

An insider familiar with the filmmakers told the outlet that the ambitious project: “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. You’d need permission from the federal government.”

The movie reportedly required federal sign-off and NASA coordination, which meant Cruise would have to seek direct assistance from Trump while he was in office. 

The source added, “Tom Cruise did not want to ask Donald Trump for a favor… Tom didn’t want to get involved for political reasons,” and that reluctance helped stall the film before it could ever properly launch.

There were reportedly other, more mundane obstacles to overcome as well. The project never had a finished script, raised concerns about insurance for sending a movie star and director into orbit, and generated background chatter about basic feasibility long before cameras could roll. 

Between the politics, the risk, and the logistics, the once-hyped “SpaceX NASA movie” is now widely described as scrapped rather than delayed.

Cruise has spent decades keeping his politics off the record, and the source says he had no interest in changing that to get a movie off the ground. 

Earlier this year, The Washington Post reported that he even turned down a 2025 Kennedy Center Honor overseen by Trump, citing “scheduling conflicts.”

Liman has always insisted the point wasn’t just strapping a movie star to a rocket. 

Speaking to Deadline about the project in September, he noted, “I’m more excited about going to space, not less… but our goal is to make something great. 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 just a promotional gimmick. I want to make a film that people watch in a hundred years, when maybe there are 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.”

Cruise released his latest “Mission: Impossible” movie, “The Final Reckoning,” earlier this year, and is working on several projects for 2026.