Tom Cruise Plots Movie To Shoot In Space With Elon Musk's SpaceX 131
Mike Fleming Jr., reporting for Deadline: I'm hearing that Tom Cruise and Elon Musk's Space X are working on a project with NASA that would be the first narrative feature film -- an action adventure -- to be shot in outer space. It's not a Mission: Impossible film and no studio is in the mix at this stage but look for more news as I get it. But this is real, albeit in the early stages of liftoff.
Sounds Like A Winner. (Score:2)
The more incarcerated the population, the more desperate the need for escapism. The whole world is in lock-down to some extent now, pretend trips to outer space will appeal.
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He's a man in space. A pretty good man in space too. Until he has a crisis of confidence and can't be a space man anymore. Then he meets a good looking woman who talks him into being a better space man.
Every. Time. Cruise. Script. Ever.
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Collateral
Re: Sounds Like A Winner. (Score:2)
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Works for the plot of Oblivion. Which is pretty good for a Tom Cruise movie.
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Thumbs up to the people in charge of the "futuristic-looking" design* of this movie.
* except the curved LCD built into the table... WTF were they thinking.
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Disney story:
Step 1: father and/or mother dies/disappears/leaves
Step 2: main story
Step 3: profits!
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Even before all of that crap, this would appeal. Your premise is flawed.
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The whole world is in lock-down to some extent now, pretend trips to outer space will appeal.
Have you seen the sequel-riddled shit pumped out of studios these days?
Staring at an Empty Field, Part Duex starring two cows, a duck, and Randy Quaid would win an Oscar right now. You gravely underestimate what people now define as entertainment, regardless of lock-down. Refer to YouTube, where desperate Hollywood goes for career advice.
Prediction (Score:5, Interesting)
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we'll be distracted with all the inaccuracies in their portrayal of zero-g.
You misspelled Xenu.
Re: Prediction (Score:5, Funny)
You misspelled Xenomorph.
-- Ripley
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In other words: We will find out that space looks nothing like it is supposed to look!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
My guess is that it won't be the traditional Sci-Fi-flicks that will look outdated.
And for Harryhausen's sake: Don't confuse stop-motion with Claymation. You don't want claymation to look too realistic.
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This will suddenly render all previous space movies somewhat obsolete...
Nah, because this movie will cost like $5,000 or more to see. After all, the movie will cost like a jillion dollars to shoot. A whole movie crew - in space? Have you seen a typical movie set these days? There are like 95 people to put out flowers. 25 people to do each actor's hair. 80 people that just bring coffee...
Only someone who's been in the movie-making industry for their whole life would think that making a movie in space is a good idea. They're very accustomed to wasting money.
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There have been movie scenes shot in zero-g simulating aircraft. Starship is bigger than those aircraft, so space should be no problem. Elon says a Starship launch may get down to $2 million dollars, but even if it's $100 million, that's not too bad on a blockbuster budget. The first movie shot in space is pretty much guaranteed to be a hit, even if people just go to see what Tom Cruise boinking someone in microgravity is actually like.
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. Elon says a Starship launch may get down to $2 million dollars,
I think that's their target for their cost, not for the launch price. But still, like you say even at 10x that it's cheap by Hollywood standards.
We're getting close to where going to the moon fits within a tentpole action movie budget. It's been said often before: you could probably fund the first trip of colonists to Mars by making it a reality TV show.
On the flipside, for people complaining about the cost of space exploration, you can justify most of it even if you purely view it as an entertainment exp
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I saw a breakdown of the price / kg into lunar transfer orbit for SLS, Falcon Heavy, Saturn V and Starship.
SLS ends up being a bit more expensive than Saturn V (corrected for inflation of course) in the $20k-$30k range, using current per launch cost estimates for SLS. Falcon Heavy can do it a bit cheaper, although it's not really designed to do so.
Starship, if you assume $100 million for the starship launch as well as each of the two refuelling launches, comes in at $2k / kg.
If that thing works, it really i
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Yep, and if Starships hits their cost targets (and SpaceX has a good history of meeting goals), that's $40/kg to the moon.
The futurist in me says: that's nothing. With Starship launch costs we can build an orbital ring (which unlike a space elevator doesn't requires unobtainium cables, or anything else fancy, just a lot of mass). With an orbital ring launch costs would be below airfreight costs and the conversation will be about moving heavy industry to space to protect the environment.
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I think with a Starship-established industrial infrastructure on the moon supplying metal, oxygen and silicon, an orbital ring would happen pretty quickly, along with space-based solar. You could even practice building one on the moon first.
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Wait, you can get paid to be sexually abused?
I'm off to Hollywood!
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The over-18 need not apply.
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Probably not because we have had plenty of actual space reference material for decades now and modern movies can be extremely realistic - if they choose to be. But they don't, and this movie probably won't choose to be either. It will do what it needs to for the plot and the action, like every other movie including the ones set on Earth do.
It really seems like a complete waste of time. Shooting in a cramped little tin can isn't easy on earth, let alone in space where most of the crew will be on the ground c
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It really seems like a complete waste of time. Shooting in a cramped little tin can isn't easy on earth, let alone in space where most of the crew will be on the ground communicating over radio.
The cramped tin cans have been available forever. No one seriously proposed shooting in one of them. This is different because it will undoubtedly involve Starship, a steel can that is anything but cramped. Elon Musk thinks Starship fitted out for crews can be comfortable for 100 people all the way to Mars. A crew of 35 plus a handful of actors and all their equipment should fit with plenty of room for set design.
When the cost to put a film crew in orbit was $3 billion for multiple cramped capsule launc
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I've watched plenty of films of real people in space. I'd much rather watch fake people in fake space, it's a lot more entertaining. The entertainment industry doesn't portray life on the ground realistically, why should they portray life in space realistically?
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This will suddenly render all previous space movies somewhat obsolete, because we'll be distracted with all the inaccuracies in their portrayal of zero-g. We are generally blind to this because our earth-bound existence gives us no intuition about what it should be like. But after seeing the real deal in the context of a film, all the sfx based on hanging from cables will look like claymation monster movies from the 1940's - still fun, but only in a "different era" way.
Yeah, because none of us has ever seen any footage from inside a space craft before...
Hollywood, take note! (Score:3)
Yes, because Hollywood has done an excellent job at taking real life, easily available information and applying it accurately to everything it produces. And the consumers have demanded it!
Just try sitting next to a medical professional while watching any scene involving a hospital/medical issue.
Or anyone in any IT field when any character does anything with a computer.
Or anyone who knows anything about physics while watching virtually any action movie, ever.
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This will suddenly render all previous space movies somewhat obsolete, because we'll be distracted with all the inaccuracies in their portrayal of zero-g. We are generally blind to this because our earth-bound existence gives us no intuition about what it should be like. But after seeing the real deal in the context of a film, all the sfx based on hanging from cables will look like claymation monster movies from the 1940's - still fun, but only in a "different era" way.
Even 1970's Star Wars special effects were light years beyond the cheesy screens shown in the background of every 1960's car chase scene. I think we can stop underestimating the hell out of the last four decades of Space-SFX now.
Besides, it's not exactly difficult to remove wires and slow down the footage to create a quite accurate illusion (as compared to NASA ISS footage) of weightlessness. It's probably harder to create the obscene amount of space explosions that seemingly come with every modern Tom Cr
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Apollo 13 did it well but that is because they filmed the zero G scenes in free fall inside of a diving aircraft.
Much of Apollo 13 was shot in zero g (Score:2)
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The "vomit comet"? That's hardly a correct name for it. And by that, I mean it's not a comet.
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That's what astronaut trainees have called it since the early '60s.
This story reminds me of when one of the bigger porn production companies approached NASA in the late-80s/early-90s about shooting a sex scene in zero-g on the Space Shuttle.
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had a taste of what real zero-g filming produces. Apollo 13's spacecraft interior scenes where shot on a set inside the vomit comet. They just made heavy use of that get the realism they desired.
I can't believe no one has referenced the OK GO [youtube.com] zero-g video yet. It's pretty amazing. I believe the final version was all one take, too, though sped up quite a bit between "hops" of the vomit comet. It took them something like 8 tries (each of which was a couple hours of flying IIRC to get enough seconds of zero-g), including one that was perfect until they discovered they had paint on the lens.
Why? Hollywood can already do it convincingly (Score:2)
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Convincingly ? Like in Gravity when she holds him by her fingertips, and after a heartfelt speech let him go and he falls down to earth ?!? Right...
Good movie, though that particular scene damn near ruined the experience for me. There were a few other minor nitpicks I had, but that one was a doozy.
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SPOILER ALERT if you haven't seen Gravity (don't bother if broken suspension of disbelief ruins things for you)
Ugh. Just one of many awful scenes in that movie. When the wave of debris first hits it's like that as well. She's working in EVA and an untethered tool starts to float away and she leaps after it and catches it, just in time to see the incoming debris. Problem is, she stops on the end of her own tether. Just stops. Even on Earth there would be some rebound. In space, she would have rebounded back
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I don't have access to the clip at the moment, but there is a video from the ISS showing what happens if an astronaut is in a position where they can't touch a surface. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to move yourself so you can grab onto something. Newton's third law and all that.
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So, if we get future space habitats that aren't so tiny and cramped, it seems like it would be a good idea for the astronauts to carry "wings" with them. Maybe some sort of collapsible fans. I wonder what the astronauts on Skylab did if they got stuck away from the walls? Skylab was a log bigger than the ISS (technically only 361 cubic meters to the 915 cubic meters of the ISS), but it was all in one big 11 meter by 17 meter by 25 meter module in skylab. The ISS modules are so narrow, that with the hull lay
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There is atmosphere, so you can swim. Not very effective though.
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I'd love to see a video of an astronaut sneezing while not touching a wall.
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To be fair, the Earth is already in space, so technically all movies ever made have been "made in space".
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Ad-Astra was pretty unrealistic in terms of how they handled gravity, especially during the launches. Terrible movie too.
This is Musks business plan (Score:4, Insightful)
Step 1. Sell expensive products only the very few and afford to get buzz and work out production problems. (Testla Roadster, Space X Nasa)
Step 2. Sell a product while still expensive it is in range of large businesses/and wealthy people (Testa Model S and X, Space X Movie Studios)
Step 3. Sell a product that is in the rage of the upper middle class normal businesses (Tesla Model 3 and Y this is where they are today)
Step 4. Sell products for the normal middle class future cars around 20k
This seems his normal plan, Sell high end stuff at low production and high profits enough to improve and sell lower priced items at a greater scale.
I think this method had created better success than GM Bolt and Volts which were targets towards the middle class first. Where there were nicer cars for less money. or Nissan Leaf which was expensive for a low end car. Luxury items can often have a high profit margins, so you can make an attractive car on its own without having to push the All electric as its only selling point.
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I think this method had created better success than GM Bolt and Volts which were targets towards the middle class first.
Yes, but doesn't work for products that need a critical mass to take off.
No matter much money I have, i wouldn't buy an electric car without widely available charging infrastructure. And that won't be build for just a few, unaffordable cars.
Video telephony over ISDN was available since the early 90s. But even the people with the money to buy the expensive video phones as there would have been no one to do a video call with.
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The thing with electric cars, is there is already a charging infrastructure.... Your home...
For 80% of all your travels are your normal daily commutes under a few hundred miles a day. So you charge up when you get home at night. Even with a good number of electric car drivers, you won't need as many charging stations than we have Gas stations. Because the charging stations will need to be mostly placed on highways or major roads where people may be doing long distance commutes.
A proper charging station s
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I mentioned that in a discussion and was a bit embarrassed when the other person mentioned their apartment complex does not have outlets at the parking spots.
For me, it's a supreme convenience with home charging. For him it renders it a non-starter because he has no where to plug in where he wants to sit around for a long time at.
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In the long run, autonomous self driving and charging could take care of that. So it's really a matter of time for all the right technologies to come together. In the mid-term. mobile car charging as a service should be a thing Have mobile trucks loaded up with battery packs that travel to your parking lot at night,(or during the day to your employer's parking lot) and charge your car for you. They could even have large battery packs that could be dropped off and picked up later so the truck wouldn't have t
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I would expect more that permanent low-voltage charging to be added as an amenity for work and apartment complexes.
Driving around trucks of big batteries would be massively inefficient, an eyesore, and hard to imagine a way to pull off without blocking in parked cars (unless the parking lots were designed around drop off locations for these battery packs, but then why not just have charging installed if going to that much trouble?)
The general attitude of 'car charging should be at least 220V' is a bit of le
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Yes. That's why it worked for Tesla, but can't be a model for every kind of product.
And of course Tesla took the big risk with rolling out their supercharger infrastructure right from the start.
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I guess you missed all those super expensive video conference rooms that universities and businesses bought. Actually, they still buy them, even though I've seen quite a few people give up on the clunky tech built into the room and just use Skype and a laptop.
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Yes. They can be better than Skype, but then they are ridiculously expensive and some proprietary system. Nothing worse than everyone sitting around a speaker phone shouting... I prefer using a headset.
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The only trouble is....they don't even make the Roadster at all anymore...and THAT is the ONLY one I"d be interested in.
I couldn't quite afford it when it was out, but I can now.
I'm not interested in a "family" car with >2 seats.....
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"The only trouble is....they don't even make the Roadster at all anymore...and THAT is the ONLY one I"d be interested in."
They make a new one.
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Not yet.
Re:This is Musks business plan (Score:4, Funny)
I think you can find one floating around somewhere.
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Delivery costs would be out of this world.
Re:This is Musks business plan (Score:5, Interesting)
You can get a Leaf 40 for around £20k. 180 mile range, autopilot, decent quality and comfort. Ideal cars for most people.
For some reason most people can't do simple maths though. They look at the range and panic. When you think about it though it's not really worth spending another £20k to get a Model 3 for the sake of saving an hour or two a year charging, which is all most people will do. If it really bothers you that much you could just rent a car and put all the miles on that.
The problem that Tesla solved is not that other EVs weren't any good or didn't have enough range, it's that people didn't understand them and were terrible at understanding their own needs. You hear people say things like "I'll wait until they have 500 miles range" when they never do anything like that in their fossil car and are wasting huge amounts of money on petrol in the mean time. I think most people don't even know how far 500 miles is, and certainly don't clock that it represents 7-8 hours continuous driving on a good day.
Tesla gave them iPhone levels of desirability that encouraged people to actually understand EVs and look in to buying one.
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It's funny as hell when someone says that and you ask them how far a full tank on their current car will take them. 15 gallon tank (which few cars have any more) x 25 mpg (which fewer cars can boast every year) = 375 miles. Damn few can drive for 500 miles without refueling.
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For many people 500 miles is well beyond bladder range anyway. I suppose you could pee in a bottle but I prefer a bit more comfort than that.
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Step 1. Sell expensive products only the very few and afford to get buzz and work out production problems. (Testla Roadster, Space X Nasa)
Step 2. Sell a product while still expensive it is in range of large businesses/and wealthy people (Testa Model S and X, Space X Movie Studios)
Step 3. Sell a product that is in the rage of the upper middle class normal businesses (Tesla Model 3 and Y this is where they are today)
Step 4. Sell products for the normal middle class future cars around 20k
What are steps 3 & 4 for Space X? I have no doubt he's got a plan for it, but I haven't heard anything.
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That's pretty much how it works with every new* product. Musk maybe does it a little more purposefully by being very vertically integrated. Tesla walked through most of those steps in a decade or so while the similar evolution of the original motor vehicles took several decades and involved a bunch of different companies.
* by new I mean actually new, not just a redesign of something that already exists.
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This seems his normal plan, Sell high end stuff at low production and high profits enough to improve and sell lower priced items at a greater scale.
Musk is quite open about this being his operating procedure. [tesla.com]
"Almost any new technology initially has high unit cost before it can be optimized and this is no less true for electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.
-Elon Musk, August 6, 2006
Really Top Gun (Score:2)
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Musk ... (Score:2)
Like many of his collaborations this will be hyped then quietly dropped ...
Alternative headline (Score:3)
Alternative headline: Tom cruise to tour space for free.
Pretty clever, actually. While Cruise clearly has enough money to pay for a ride to space, why pay for it when you can get paid to do it? SpaceX has gotten launch prices low enough that hiring a ship to LEO in a Crew Dragon is well within the budget of a major motion picture. Now they just need a plot and script that can be filmed in a few days inside a seven-person capsule. Heck, they might even be able to do some EVA. With a solid core of actual-space footage, some good writing and probably a healthy dose of CGI, it should be pretty easy to make a feature-length film at a budget that will make it profitable.
I suspect that Cruise might even be willing to do it for free, which would cut some $25M from the cost. The movie wouldn't even have to be particularly good to be profitable.
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Pretty clever, actually. While Cruise clearly has enough money to pay for a ride to space, why pay for it when you can get paid to do it? SpaceX has gotten launch prices low enough that hiring a ship to LEO in a Crew Dragon is well within the budget of a major motion picture. Now they just need a plot and script that can be filmed in a few days inside a seven-person capsule. Heck, they might even be able to do some EVA. With a solid core of actual-space footage, some good writing and probably a healthy dose of CGI, it should be pretty easy to make a feature-length film at a budget that will make it profitable.
Do the studios, directors, and producers that would have access to the capital necessary to hitch a ride with SpaceX even know how to do movies on a low budget and quick, set timeframe anymore?
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As OK Go have shown, you can do pretty impressive Zero-G filiming with just parabolic flights and excellent planning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Good writing? This is a Tom Cruise movie we're talking about, isn't it? He only hires Scientologists, one of the most mentally-crippling religions around. Good luck with that.
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He really does bring it to work though. Movies like "Far and Away" were required, due to contract demands from Tom Cruise, to film partly on Scientology owned properties and use the scientology "Clear-sound" sound system for audio to funnel money to his "religion". They actually build a movie/TV studio complex back in 2016 specifically to use for projects by movie/tv stars they have in their stable.
They can remake Apollo 13 (Score:2)
Hopefully (Score:2)
Tom Cruise will do us all a favor and burn up on re-entry.
Star Cruise: The Search for Xenu (Score:2)
I'm just here for the Scientology jokes. Don't let me down.
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I'm just here for the Scientology jokes. Don't let me down.
I'm just here to find out who his wingman will be; Lone Starr or Iceman.
(Spoiler Alert) Xenu, is Spocks Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-(Google) Grandfather.
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Wrong! Xenu is Spock's father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.
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Wrong! Xenu is Spock's father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.
Woah. Not even Yogurt saw that one coming.
What's the story? (Score:2)
Children both (Score:2)
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One hundred years from now, Elon Musk will be the man who will be remembered for first truly exploiting space for his own amusement and profit.
Musk has done the equivalent of being the first "civilian" to send an email. Not exactly impressive or memorable decades later when his space junk will be surrounded by a lot of other stupid shit. Who knows, he might be blamed for "championing" the Space Junk Generation, making SpaceX as immortal as Chernobyl.
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I think there's a decent chance he'll be remembered for being the first to launch a car into interstellar space. Also, if they succeed, they'll also be remembered for returning human spaceflight to the US after a nearly decade long gap. Also, the first re-usable VTOL space vehicle, etc. etc.
This is never going to happen (Score:2)
It's just too expensive to shoot any scenes in space when they can be shot in a studio or done via CGI for a small fraction of the cost. Remember: They need the fuel to not just transport some actors but also lots of staff and their tools into earth orbit. They need air, water, food for that time too, more fuel to spend. And do you really want to train all those people to become at last kind of astronauts?
As I said above: This is never going to happen.
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It's just too expensive to shoot any scenes in space when they can be shot in a studio or done via CGI for a small fraction of the cost. Remember: They need the fuel to not just transport some actors but also lots of staff and their tools into earth orbit. They need air, water, food for that time too, more fuel to spend. And do you really want to train all those people to become at last kind of astronauts?
As I said above: This is never going to happen.
Speaking of orbit, if you use this telescope, you might be able to make out the tippy top of the cash pile these people own.
We can stop pretending cost would be an issue here. Shitty scripts and massive losses aren't exactly a deterrent for Hollywood on Earth, and it never has been for Musk anywhere.
Astronomical-!! (Score:2)
Worthy goal (Score:2)
Most expensive movie ever made (Score:2)
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Sadly, the FX aren't so good now that you can't tell the difference. If anything, CGI effects have gotten worse over the years. Sure, the actual technology has gotten easier and better. The problem is that the actual artists have gotten worse. They're usually trained to the tools, but don't seem to understand the fundamentals, or reality for that matter. Also, there seems to be a feedback loop with video games where the effects get better and more realistic and the animators draw their clues for what's real
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It almost certainly wouldn't be entirely filmed in space. Most space movies feature plenty of terrestrial scenes. They would be restricted in what they could bring up, so they would have to be very creative and disciplined with what they do, how much crew they have, etc. The actual film crew, for example, would probably need to made of already trained astronauts with experience in space so that the movie wouldn't have to pay to train film crew into astronauts, etc. It all depends on how much they would be a
It's very clear out in space (Score:2)
High enough to be targetted by galactic space cruisers, but not high enough to escape body thetans.
Tom, what the hell are you doing??!!!?
New camera crew specilizations soon (Score:2)
I'm kind of floored at the thought that there might be a handful of studios out there that will soon specialize in shooting in space as well as in dangerous scenarios like EVA. You'll need camera, sound, and all the backend logistics to help with this, along with likely stunt people that can handle micro-gravity and EVA scenarios. Soon "Microgravity Camera Assistant" and "EVA Stunt Man" and "EVA Stunt Coordinator" will be job listings in a few places.
Top Gun 3! Maverick Relaunched! (Score:2)
Flat Earth (Score:2)
Don't bet on it... (Score:2)
I can't imagine what Lloyds of London would charge to insure the likes of Tom Cruise in such an endeavour.
Re:A dummy reunion (Score:5, Funny)
'It's being said that the co-star for this movie will be "Starman" '
Jeff Bridges? Nice!
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Damn right! It's Tom Cruise's fault! Elon is not ill! Let's all rejoice!
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...take him to space. Leave him there.
The last thing Tom Cruise did that was humanitarian and good was letting Katie Holmes go.
"Let" her go? She had to fight vigorously.