Tom Cruise & Christopher McQuarrie Plotting New Musical, Action Thriller & More Les Grossman While Speed Flying Through ‘Mission: Impossible 8’

DEADLINE EXCLUSIVE: As Top Gun: Maverick passed $1.3 billion to climb to 13th place on the all time worldwide gross list, star Tom Cruise and producer Christopher McQuarrie are in the early stages of setting up three very different projects. They are still in the thick of Mission: Impossible 8 — Cruise was recently photographed in the UK’s Lake District practicing what appears to be his next death defying stunt, something called ‘speed flying’ — sources said that Cruise and McQuarrie are hatching three new film projects. One is an original song and dance-style musical they’ll craft as a star vehicle for Cruise. They are also setting up another original action film with franchise potential, and they are also fixated on Les Grossman. The latter is the gruff, dance-happy studio executive Cruise played in cameo for Tropic Thunder. It’s unclear if they will create a whole movie around Grossman, or borrow him for inclusion in either of the other vehicles.

Cruise has long been interested in doing a musical. He learned to sing like a rock star for Rock of Ages, and would dance as well, with all three of these scripts to be written by McQuarrie in collaboration with Cruise.

Also looming large is the untitled film that Cruise intends to make with director Doug Liman and McQuarrie producing. You know, the one they’ll shoot in outer space, with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Since Deadline broke the story about this plan, Universal signed on to be the studio. As Deadline subsequently reported, they’ve aligned with SEE-1, film producer duo Elena and Dmitry Lesnevsky’s newly-launched Space Entertainment Enterprise (S.E.E.) that will dock with Axiom’s world-first commercial space station Axiom Station, which is connected to the International Space Station (ISS). That one might well come next.

So much for the notion of Cruise slowing down at age 60. If you’ve forgotten his floor moves as Grossman, here’s a reminder: