Tom Cruise working on three new movies with Mission: Impossible 7 director — including a musical

We now have a pretty good idea of how Tom Cruise plans to follow up Top Gun: Maverick, beyond Mission: Impossible 7 and 8.

In an exclusive report, Deadline (opens in new tab) is stating that Cruise and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Parts One and Two director Christopher McQuarrie will be partnering up for a further three unannounced movies. These projects are pretty broad in scope, though the initial highlight is Cruise’s desire to follow up Rock of Ages with an original musical.

Of course, these projects will now go to the back of an already packed calendar for this summer’s biggest star. Cruise already has Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One and Part Two coming out in each of the next two summers. Aka get ready for Cruise to take the title of summer blockbuster king for three years in a row.

Tom Cruise’s three big new projects

Yes, Cruise is in fact working on a musical, or he is if Deadline’s reporting is to be believed. Cruise and McQuarrie are planning to develop an original song and dance-style musical. That means new IP, so there shouldn’t be any worries about a potential Top Gun: The Musical hitting the silver screen any time soon.

Not that Cruise doesn’t have the skills to lead in a musical. The actor trained successfully to be able to sing like a rock musician for Rock of Ages, so the expectations for this project shouldn’t be low. Plus, if Risky Business was any indication, we know he can dance.

The other two projects that are now rumored to be in the works are (shocker) another original action film with franchise potential to go along with Cruise’s other two action franchises, and a space-based film directed by Doug Liman, with McQuarrie producing. NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are going to be assisting, and it looks like Cruise’s next project. 

There’s also talk of a potential Tropic Thunder spinoff, but it may be one of the other projects. In Tropic Thunder, a comedy starring Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black, Cruise played Les Grossman, a producer with a penchant for dancing a bit and cursing — a lot. Cruise has been rumored to have been working on this project in the past, with Entertainment Weekly (opens in new tab) reporting on a potential movie as far back as 2010. As Deadline notes “It’s unclear if they will create a whole movie around Grossman, or borrow him for inclusion in either of the other vehicles.” Either way, they want to revive the character.

What other movies is Tom Cruise working on? 

Cruise should be able to quickly capitalize on the success of Top Gun: Maverick. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is slated for a July 14, 2023 release and is already in post-production. The follow-up, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two is currently filming in the U.K. and will come out a year later. 

Cruise was recently spotted filming “speed flying” for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two. This is expected to be a new stunt to make all previous Tom Cruise stunts — well, they’ll still probably look awesome, but this one is supposed to be even crazier.

Deadline says that Universal is signed on to be the studio for the space-based project, which could end up being the most ambitious of Cruise’s career.