Tom Cruise will reunite with Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman on a new science-fiction movie, Luna Park, which centres on a group of renegade space scientists vying to secure a power source from the moon.
The Hollywood Reporter suggests the long-gestating film, a passion project for the film-maker behind Swingers, The Bourne Identity and Mr & Mrs Smith, has been given a new lease of life by Cruise’s interest. The Top Gun star has seen a strong box-office return for his Christopher McQuarrie-directed spy sequel Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which passed $500m at the global box office last week and looks likely to post a franchise-best total after breaking records in China at the weekend. Edge of Tomorrow was also a hit last year, taking $369.2m worldwide off the back of positive reviews.
Luna Park is being set up by Paramount Pictures, which had previously placed the film on the shelf due to budget concerns. The plot centres on a rebellious group of former employees of a space-exploration company who travel the world stealing equipment as part of a plan to use the moon as an energy source. Before setting off for space, they must also kidnap an ex-Nasa employee who holds the key to the success of their mission.
Liman’s film is just the latest expensive space-themed project to move into production, following box-office success for Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning Gravity in 2013 and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar last year. Last month it was revealed that Robert Pattinson will take the lead role of an astronaut operating beyond the borders of our solar system in an an untitled new film from novelist-turned-screenwriter Zadie Smith and director Claire Denis, while Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt are due to play interstellar travellers who awake from cryogenic sleep almost a century too early in the $150m romance, Passengers.
Cruise will also work with Liman on Mena, a biopic of the TWA pilot, drug runner and sometime DEA informant Barry Seal, which is due out in 2017.
