The Russians Beat Tom Cruise to Shooting a Movie in Space
The Russians and Americans have an interesting history involving the space race. The Russians were the first country to launch a satellite into space, as well as send a man into orbit. America was the first country to land a man on the Moon. Well, now it looks like Russia is going to be the first country to produce a movie that will be shot in space.
As you know, Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman are planning to shoot a movie in space on the International Space Station. But, the Russians are going to beat them to it.
The movie being developed is titled The Challenge, and it will tell the story of “a Russian doctor who’s sent to the International Space Station to save the life of a cosmonaut.” If all goes according to plan, the production team will launch into space next month on a 12-day mission to shoot the movie.
The Challenge will be directed by Klim Shipenko, who is the director of the comedy Son of a Rich, which is Russia’s highest-grossing film of all time. The movie will star Yulia Peresild, a veteran screen and stage actor who was cast after a country-wide talent search.
According to the report, the production team took a crash course in space travel earlier this year at the Yuri Gagarin Center for Cosmonaut Training. Last week a commission of medical and safety experts from the center gave the project approval to move forward.
Shipenko and Peresild are set to blast off on October 5th in a Soyuz spaceship piloted by Anton Shkaplerov, a veteran cosmonaut, with a backup crew on standby in the event of any last-minute medical problems.
Konstantin Ernst, CEO of the movie’s commissioner Channel One, toned down the notion of a new space race heating up, saying that “cinema isn’t sports.” He went on to say, “We certainly would have preferred arriving at the International Space Station at the same time with Tom Cruise. We would have enjoyed shooting the film together much better.”
As for Cruise’s film project, there’s no information on when they will head up into the cosmos to shoot the film. In the end, out. of both projects, even though the Russians will shoot their movie in space first, Cruise’s movie is going to make a lot more money at the box office.
Source: Variety