From Top Gun to Days of Thunder: Cruise Goes Back for More

Tom Cruise has decided that flying fighter jets at ridiculous speeds is no longer enough.

He’s getting back in a race car.

More than 35 years after Days of Thunder, Cruise is returning as NASCAR driver Cole Trickle, with Anne Hathaway joining him as a team owner and engineer. The sequel is scheduled for 2nd June 2028, will be shot for IMAX and once again Jerry Bruckheimer is producing.

And Cruise clearly wanted to make the announcement himself. He posted a photograph of himself and Hathaway alongside a NASCAR car at Daytona International Speedway with the wonderfully simple caption:

“Days of Thunder. Summer 2028.” Then came the video.

Cruise and Hathaway stand together at Daytona before revealing the car, with the very pregnant Hathaway joking that she is going to have her baby first and then they are going to make the movie. Which already feels very Tom Cruise. No solemn studio press release. No logo appearing slowly through some smoke. Just Tom, Anne and a very fast-looking car.

But there is another reason Days of Thunder suddenly feels like a much bigger deal than it might have ten years ago.

Two words. Top Gun. The parallels are almost impossible to ignore. Both original movies starred Cruise as an outrageously talented young man who goes extremely fast, ignores sensible advice and needs to learn that occasionally other human beings know things too. Both were directed by Tony Scott. Both were produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson.And now both have become decades-later Cruise legacy sequels with Bruckheimer back producing. That matters because Top Gun: Maverick completely changed the rules.

When somebody suggested making another Top Gun 36 years after the original, it sounded suspiciously like Hollywood nostalgia gone mad. Then Maverick arrived. It was brilliant. It made around $1.5 billion worldwide, picked up six Oscar nominations and proved that an old franchise could return without simply becoming an expensive tribute act.

So now Cruise wants to try it again. And Days of Thunder might actually be the perfect candidate. The 1990 original was never as culturally enormous as Top Gun. It made nearly $158 million worldwide and received fairly mixed reviews, but over the years it has developed a sizeable following.

More importantly, modern filmmaking technology and Cruise’s increasingly unhinged commitment to doing things for real could make NASCAR racing look extraordinary on an IMAX screen.

Imagine Top Gun: Maverick, except instead of F/A-18s flying through mountains, it’s stock cars travelling three-wide at 190mph.

We're listening.

Hathaway is an excellent addition too. After The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey, she is hardly choosing small projects at the moment. Putting her opposite Cruise for the first time immediately makes this feel like more than a nostalgia exercise.

There is one major difference from Maverick. Joseph Kosinski isn’t directing. Instead, Warm Bodies and Long Shot director Jonathan Levine takes the wheel, working from a screenplay by Will Staples. That makes this slightly harder to predict. But perhaps that's a good thing. Days of Thunder doesn't need to copy Top Gun: Maverick. It just needs to remember what made that movie work.

Real speed. Real spectacle. A bit of nostalgia. And Tom Cruise apparently refusing to grow old like everybody else.

Cole Trickle is back. Start your engines.