Tom Cruise allegedly scrapped his space movie to avoid asking Donald Trump for a favor

Tom Cruise continues to prove that he would do anything for the movies — with the monumental exception of associating himself with President Donald Trump. According to an exclusive report, Cruise has decided to indefinitely put a hold on his outer space movie, where he was meant to reunite with Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman.

Cruise has carefully crafted one of the most unique careers in Hollywood history. Starting out as a dramatic actor, he slowly transitioned into action movie stardom after a PR crisis. Cruise became so comfortable and accomplished within the genre, and stunt work in particular, that he was nominated by Trump for the Kennedy Center Honors this year — an offer he reportedly rejected behind the scenes.

As most people remember, Cruise has had his fair share of bad publicity, so the last thing he needs is to be roped into Trump’s political chessboard, where the only thing he could gain is renewed scrutiny into his past and his religious beliefs. According to Page Six, this latest Cruise project — in which he was set to become the first person to take a real spacewalk for a film — was going to involve SpaceX and NASA, as Cruise would have needed federal approval to make the dream a reality.

A source told the publication that Cruise dropped out of the project after learning this and simply said, “Tom didn’t want to ask for political reasons.” Cruise rarely, if ever, offers opinions about anything beyond his movies. He has managed to almost entirely extinguish his private life from his career as a movie star, so it’s hardly surprising that he would outright deny anyone the opportunity to use his image for political gain.

Cruise is now nearing his mid-60s, which likely means he will eventually ease up on the death-defying stunts. In a sense, this project was going to be the big one, but I suppose he’ll just have to settle for the plane-jumping sequence in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, which is quite an achievement in itself.

All of this suggests that Trump may have just robbed one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the opportunity to pull off his most impressive feat yet. NASA had reportedly been excited about the prospect of being involved in a new Tom Cruise movie and even posted on X with great anticipation, writing, “NASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station! We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA’s ambitious plans a reality.”

But hey, you lose some — you win some. Trump has his own Hollywood agenda, after all. He recently announced a plan to save jobs in Hollywood by enforcing tariffs on films made on location outside of the U.S. It’s unclear how that would even work. Nobody knows whether that means higher taxes on movies or higher ticket prices, as Trump didn’t clarify. At least the president has decided to finally revive the mythical Rush Hour 4, so there’s that.

Cruise will very likely pivot back to dramatic work later in his career, and since it’s been so long since he last did, that might end up being just as exciting to anticipate.