It’s been a big week in Hollywood for very famous men contemplating how they want to make the cars go fast (vroom vroom vroom), as Tom Cruise has reportedly starting musing on the possibility of a sequel to his 1990 “Cars have big engine, go in circle” film Days Of Thunder. This, just a day after news broke that Tom Holland and Austin Butler were teaming up for a film about a pair of historical pro drivers who went to jail because they were paying for Da Big Engines by smuggling tons of marijuana. Actors: They love to drive the cars.
To be fair to Cruise, even skipping over the natural inclination for actors of a certain type to want to make the cars go Very Fast, he’s had a pretty good track record recently by revisiting his earlier films. (And especially an earlier film directed by the late Tony Scott; Days Of Thunder reunited the Top Gun duo back in the day—and then got drubbed by critics for basically being Top Gun in cars.) Top Gun: Maverick made a truly ludicrous amount of money by marrying modern technology, Cruise’s aging charisma, and the appeal of very large engines going real fast, so why not assume it could happen again by revisiting the life of NASCAR driver Cole Trickle? (Also, we had completely forgotten that Cruise’s character in the movie was named Cole Trickle; maybe that’s why it didn’t make nearly as much money as Top Gun.)
Cruise is reportedly eyeing the sequel project even as his schedule continues to be extremely full; he’s still got that movie where he has to go into actual space to film, for instance, as well as trying to figure out a sequel to Maverick, because they don’t let you make that much money at the box office without getting shoved into a sequel. Still, he apparently thinks a Days Of Thunder sequel could work, presumably tapping into the same “Sure, he’s old, but he’s still got it!” vibes that powered the Top Gun sequel. (Meanwhile, it feels noteworthy that director Joseph Kosinski, who helmed Maverick and has gotten a lot of credit for making the planes in that movie look so big and so fast and so good, is making his own car-fast movie right now, with his Brad Pitt-starring F1 due in theaters next year.)
[via THR]
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