A new report from Variety reveals that Universal is close to landing the untitled film Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman plan to shoot in outer space in partnership with SpaceX, a history-making project I cannot imagine any studio wanting to land. The latest update notes the film doesn't yet have a script, only this extremely ominous tagline:

“You can’t be sure what you’re going to get up there, and you have one shot to do it.”

Wait, sorry, that is an actual quote from a real person "familiar with the project" talking about a movie shoot that has to avoid Tom Cruise accidentally drifting away from the set and floating one million light-years away into the color vortex from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There is an above-zero percent chance that Tom Cruise enters the Earth's orbit and strikes the planet like a meteor, ending civilization as we know it by 2026. It's a big investment for any studio, is what I'm saying. Early estimates place the budget of this scriptless voyage into the unknown at $200 million minimum, which includes Cruise's salary and unprecedented insurance plans for various space-based complications that may arise. There's no air up there, you know.

There's a lot of roadblocks this film has to hurdle even before blasting a movie crew upwards of 70 miles above the Earth's surface like a somehow less qualified Armageddon drilling team. (Or is it quicker to train astronauts how to shoot a movie? The age-old question.) Cruise still has to finish Christopher McQuarrie's Mission: Impossible 7—which was halted due to the COVID shutdown earlier this year—with plans to immediately jump into production on the eighth installment of that franchise afterward. Assuming neither of those films kill Tom Cruise, then we can start thinking about getting a 60-plus-year-old actor on to the International Space Station.

For more on the project, here are the first details from when it was first announced.