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Tom Cruise planning to team with Elon Musk to shoot action movie in space

Tom Cruise is preparing for liftoff.

According to Deadline, the 57-year-old action star is plotting an out-of-this-world adventure movie with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and NASA that will be the first fictional film to shoot in space.

The storyline is in the early stages, but it won’t feature in either of Cruise’s upcoming

Mission: Impossible sequels. Those films are currently on hold after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown lensing on the seventh and eighth instalments of the long-running franchise in February.

The three-time Oscar nominee isn’t a stranger to performing death-defying stunts in his movies. For the fourth

Mission: Impossible film — Ghost

Protocol — he dangled off the world’s tallest skyscraper — Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.

“The biggest special effect in there is Tom Cruise was willing to go out there and hang on the outside of a giant building,”

Ghost Protocol director Brad Bird told the Sun of the stunt. “We got a little bit depressed at one point thinking everyone would just think it was a special effect. But, you know what, people could tell. They could tell that we were there and Tom was actually on the building … we had a star that was willing to go out there and do it and hang on the Burj … It made it really fun.” For the next film in the series

— Rogue Nation — Cruise hung off the side of a plane and held his breath for a six-minute underwater scene.

Marked by a series of envelope-pushing stunts,

Fallout — the sixth Mission film — featured Cruise performing a HALO (high altitude, low opening) jump, piloting a helicopter, dangling off the side of Norway’s Pulpit Rock, jumping off a building (he broke his ankle on that one) and riding a motorbike in an intricate chase through the streets of Paris. In this year’s long-awaited

Top Gun sequel, Cruise learned to pilot a fighter jet. “You can’t act that, the distortion in the face. They’re pulling 7-and-ahalf, 8 Gs. That’s 1,600 pounds of force,” he says in a featurette. Cruise’s newest Mission:

Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie (he has helmed the last two as well as the next two instalments) told the Sun in a 2018 interview that the actor is constantly trying to give audiences new thrills.

“No sooner was (Fallout) in the can and out the door that Tom turned to me and said, ‘Here’s what I want to do next.’ In fact, at the premiere in Paris that was the first time Tom and I sat down to watch the film together. The response from the audience was amazing and as the credits rolled and the audience was cheering, Tom turned to me and said, ‘Yeah, we can do better.’ ”

Deadline gave no timeline on when Cruise’s space movie might shoot. When movies can start filming again, he’ll first have to complete work on

Mission: Impossible 7 and 8, which hit theatres Nov. 19, 2021, and Nov. 4, 2022, respectively.

Meanwhile, Top Gun: Maverick is due out Dec. 23.