Having made it his mission to risk life and limb every time he steps onto a film set in the name of nothing but entertaining audiences around the world, it was only a matter of time before Tom Cruise decided that this planet could no longer contain him to take his talents to outer space.
While the Mission: Impossible star’s feature film being developed alongside regular collaborator Doug Liman and Elon Musk’s SpaceX remains on the cards, he’s been beaten to the punch by Russian sci-fi The Challenge, which has officially claimed a place in the record books as the first movie to be filmed beyond the stars.
Never one to pass up the opportunity to rub it in American faces, Vladimir Putin was quick to celebrate the release of the ambitious undertaking, remarking after The Challenge‘s release this past Thursday that “We are the first to have shot a feature film in orbit, aboard a spacecraft. Once again, the first.”
Producer Konstantin Ernst even took a shot at the acclaimed Gravity for good measure, admitting that while “we are all fans of Gravity, our Challenge shot in actual weightlessness shows that was just CGI.” Now that the precedent has been set, you can be damn sure Cruise will be pulling out all the stops to blow the film out of the water, especially when his project is going to be coming armed with a much bigger budget and a great deal more action, not that we ever expected Cruise and Putin to be in direct competition.