Days of Thunder Is Getting a Sequel, and It Has a Release Date
Tom Cruise picked a fitting stage for the news: Daytona International Speedway, where he confirmed the Days of Thunder sequel Saturday, just hours before NASCAR ran its Cup Series regular season finale there. He’s set to reprise Cole Trickle, the driver he first played in 1990.
Anne Hathaway is joining him, cast as a team owner and engineer. Paramount has locked in June 2, 2028 for the release. The studio is treating it as a big screen event, shooting on IMAX cameras for a theatrical exclusive that includes Dolby Cinema and 4DX.
A New Team Behind the Wheel
Jonathan Levine will direct, working from a script by Will Staples. Bruckheimer, Cruise, and Tommy Harper are producing, the same trio that worked together on Top Gun: Maverick (Harper served as executive producer on that film). Nobody’s rolling camera yet. Cruise and Hathaway, who’s expecting her third child, joked during the announcement that they’d get moving on the film once the baby arrives.
The Long Wait for a Green Flag
Talks between Cruise and Paramount go back further than this weekend. The Hollywood Reporter had word of them as early as November 2024. Jeff Gordon, the four-time Cup Series champion, spent that stretch openly campaigning for the movie to happen. He and Cruise go back years; Cruise was on hand in 2015 when NASCAR threw Gordon’s retirement send-off.
From Cult Favorite to Franchise Bet
The 1990 original made $157.9 million against a $60 million budget, and critics were not kind to it at the time. NASCAR fans didn’t care. Lines from the movie are still tossed around in the sport’s circles decades later. Cole Trickle, Cruise’s character, was loosely drawn from real life driver Tim Richmond. Paramount’s real benchmark here is Top Gun: Maverick, the film Cruise revived decades after its original and turned into a $1.49 billion global hit.
