Tom Cruise Announces Follow-Up To 1990 Cult Favorite Film
Tom Cruise confirmed he will return as Cole Trickle in a "Days of Thunder" sequel with Anne Hathaway, due in 2028.
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Tom Cruise, 64, stood at Daytona International Speedway on Saturday, ahead of NASCAR's regular-season finale, and announced that he is making another "Days of Thunder." He returns as Cole Trickle. Paramount has it dated for June 2, 2028.
The package
Anne Hathaway joins as a team owner and engineer. Jonathan Levine directs from a script by Will Staples, with Cruise producing alongside Jerry Bruckheimer and Tommy Harper.
That lineup tells you roughly what kind of film this intends to be. Bruckheimer's involvement in particular signals a return to the original's register rather than a reinvention of it — the same machinery, thirty-eight years later, pointed at the same sport.
An odd property to revive
The interesting thing is what is being brought back. The 1990 original was not a critical success and did not need to be. It survived by adoption: racing fans took it up over decades as the one film that got the sport approximately right, and it became a classic through attrition rather than acclaim.
That is a genuinely different kind of cultural asset than a hit. Nobody at Paramount in 1990 was told they had made something durable. The durability was conferred later, from outside, by people watching it on television on Sunday afternoons.
The bet being placed
Which makes the sequel a specific wager — the same one "Top Gun: Maverick" won, and presumably the reason this exists at all. The proposition is that a 38-year gap is an asset rather than a liability, and that an audience will turn out for the older version of a character they met when the actor was 27.
It worked once. It is worth noting that it worked once with an intellectual property that had been enormous on release, which this one was not, and with a star whose relationship to aviation the audience had watched him build in public for years.
Announcing it at Daytona
Doing it at the Speedway, in front of the crowd whose loyalty kept the first film alive, is not subtle. It is also entirely correct.
Those are the people who made the sequel possible, they are being told first, and every one of them will be quoted in the coverage. Whatever else Cruise has lost over the years, the instinct for where to stand while making an announcement is not on the list.