Upcoming Tom Cruise Movies You Won't Want To Miss

Though Tom Cruise has seen his share of ups and downs over the course of his decades-long career in Hollywood, he's still one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. And as for his career, well, ups and downs aside, it remains one of the more impressive, and most adventurous, in cinema history.

The actor famously got his start starring in eighties teen comedies, but quickly found favor in the dramatic realm, and saw his career kick into overdrive once he began fronting action-packed blockbusters. Along the way, he's worked with some of the most iconic filmmakers in the biz (Scorsese, Spielberg, Kubrick, and Paul Thomas Anderson, among them). He's also fronted a blockbuster franchise, earned three Academy Award nominations, and sacrificed his body in service of performing his own death-defying stunt-work.

Simply put, there isn't much that Tom Cruise hasn't done in the movie business. But even as he has almost virtually nothing left to prove, Cruise continues to push his own limits on screen — a fact evinced by the staggering slate of films he currently has in the works, in the can, or deep in production. Here's a look at a few of Tom Cruise's upcoming movies you really don't want to miss.

The next time movie lovers will see Tom Cruise on the big screen will be in one of the most anxiously-awaited sequels in the history of moving pictures. That film is, of course, the sequel to Cruise's 1986 blockbuster Top Gun, which found the actor portraying a hot-shot pilot (ahem, "Naval Aviator") learning hard life lessons while pulling some serious Gs in the cockpit of an F-16. 

As far as eighties classics go, you'd be hard-pressed to find a flick as certifiably "classic" as Top Gun. And yet, even as sequel-ready as the original film seemed, it took over three decades for the followup to finally come together, with Cruise himself shocking the whole of San Diego Comic Con 2019 by delivering the first trailer for Top Gun: Maverick himself, promising a summer 2020 release for the film.

But then 2020 arrived, and brought with it issues the world could never have foreseen, forcing movie theaters to shutter not just for the summer movie season, but for the foreseeable future. Those closures naturally forced every major studio to shuffle the release dates for the entirety of their 2020 slate, including Top Gun: Maverick, which was initially bumped to December 2020 before finally landing a prime spot in Paramount Pictures' summer 2021 lineup. And while its a sincere bummer that Top Gun fans are still waiting to see Cruise reprise his iconic role as the cocksure "Maverick," we're still more than pumped to see this one.

Tom Cruise has been front and center for some of the biggest movies released in the past few decades. As it happens, six of those films have found him portraying the same character — that being Impossible Mission Force all-star, Ethan Hunt. And whatever you think of Cruise's ongoing Mission: Impossible films, the franchise has become one of the most successful cinema has yet seen, grossing over $3.5 billion at the global box office to date. 

By the time Cruise is finished with the series, that box office take will be significantly higher, because the franchise is still very much alive, and some might even claim it keeps getting better, particularly after the action-packed spectacular that was 2018's  Mission: Impossible – Fallout. Given the overwhelming success of that film, it was hardly a surprise that Cruise announced a follow-up. What was surprising was that Cruise didn't just announce one follow-up film, but two, which would be shot back-to-back with Fallout helmer Christopher McQuarrie in the director's chair.

As has been the case with every Mission: Impossible flick going back to the 1996 original, next to nothing is known about what madness awaits Hunt and his team in the new films, but as shots from the currently in-production sequels continue to roll in, it's clear that Cruise and everyone involved are out to make the new films the coolest, and biggest, Mission: Impossible adventures yet. 

If you've been tracking Tom Cruise's career in the past 15 to 20 years, you might've noticed he's made a habit of working with the same directors, re-teaming with the likes of McQuarrie, Edward Zwick, and Joseph Kosinski on the regular. You'll soon be able to add Doug Liman to the list of recurring Cruise collaborators, as the duo have a handful of projects in various stages of production.

Chief among them is a sequel to the pair's 2014 sci-fi spectacle Edge of Tomorrow. That film found Cruise portraying Cage, a soldier doomed to die over and over again in combat, after getting stuck in a mysterious, Groundhog Day-ish time loop that's broken only with the help of a fearsome fellow warrior Rita (Emily Blunt). 

As many likely recall, Edge of Tomorrow hit theaters in the summer of 2014, and while it was hardly a bomb, the pricey flick didn't exactly set the box office ablaze. Still, word of mouth on the film remained strong, with some proclaiming it an unheralded sci-fi classic. And Edge of Tomorrow really is an extraordinary action adventure that deserved a lot more love upon release, and probably should've earned a sequel sooner than it has. 

Luckily, stars may finally be aligning to bring Liman, Cruise, and Blunt back into the fray for a fresh round of time-looping insanity. And while nothing is set in stone regarding the tentatively titled Live Die Repeat and Repeat (even Cruise's involvement is listed as "rumored" on IMDb), it's safe to assume Edge of Tomorrow's still-growing fandom is beyond excited by the possibilities. 

As mentioned, Tom Cruise is about to get a whole lot of face time with his Edge of Tomorrow and American Made director Doug Liman. And that'll be true even if that rumored Edge of Tomorrow sequel never materializes, because the duo have two more high-profile projects in the works, both of which will find Cruise venturing to outer space in some capacity or another. 

One of those films will likely find Cruise playing spaceman on studio backlots, with the actor-slash-producer enlisting Liman to helm a pseudo space-heist flick titled Luna Park. That film is currently listed as being in pre-production, but would potentially find Cruise leading a band of space workers to the moon to steal a game-changing energy source.

As for the other film, well, it seems that untitled project would find the real-life Cruise and Liman actually blasting into space, literally — with a little help from NASA and entrepreneur-slash-SpaceX head honcho Elon Musk — to make a movie set on the International Space Station. 

Yes, the actual International Space Station, in actual space. 

Cruise and his cohorts announced the insanely ambitious project earlier this year, though little else is known about what they've got in the works. At this point, all we really know is that if they do get this thing off the ground, they've got a promise from Universal Pictures to pony up a staggering $200 million to help make it happen. And frankly, it now seems like the tragedy of tragedies if Tom Cruise doesn't actually get to make a movie in space.