2026 has been a quiet year for Tom Cruise so far, but that’s all going to change soon when he returns to the big screen to star in one of the most anticipated movies of 2026, Digger. Co-starring Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, and John Goodman, the film was written and directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu with help from Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jez Butterworth, and Sabina Berman. Cruise recently starred in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and while he never exactly came out and said it, it’s expected that it was his final movie as Ethan Hunt — the title also gives off that impression. After Digger, the only other movie that Cruise has on the release schedule is the highly anticipated sequel to Days of Thunder, which has already been dated for release on June 2, 2028.
Tom Cruise has also confirmed that he will star in another Top Gun sequel with Miles Teller and Glen Powell, but at the time of writing, it’s still unclear when the film will be released. After the colossal success of Top Gun: Maverick, most fans thought that Paramount would be further along on the third installment by now. The legacy sequel grossed $1.5 billion at the box office, and it’s also been one of the most popular movies on Paramount Plus for years now, but it’s officially set to join a new streaming library soon. Netflix has officially announced that Top Gun: Maverick, the movie Steven Spielberg once proclaimed “saved Hollywood,” will begin streaming on the platform on September 22. It’s also streaming for free on Pluto TV, and the streamer has not announced any plans for it to depart the platform.
Advertisement
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Advertisement
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
Advertisement
01
Advertisement
How does a room know you’ve walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
02
Advertisement
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
03
Advertisement
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
04
Advertisement
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.
05
Advertisement
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
06
Advertisement
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
07
Advertisement
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
08
Advertisement
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Advertisement
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023
Advertisement
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023
Advertisement
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025
Advertisement
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013
Advertisement
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
Advertisement
What’s Going on With ‘Top Gun 3’?
Top Gun 3 is officially confirmed, but there haven’t been many updates on the film since last year, when Christopher McQuarrie confirmed that he had broken the story and just needed writer Ehren Kruger to turn it into a workable script. Once Cruise finishes promoting Digger later this year, he’s expected to begin shooting Days of Thunder 2 to prepare for its 2028 launch date. Thinking optimistically, even if Cruise begins working on Top Gun 3 after Days of Thunder 2, it’s unlikely the film will be released anytime before 2030.
Check out Top Gun: Maverick on Netflix starting on September 22 and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of Tom Cruise’s future projects.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Release Date
May 27, 2022
Runtime
Advertisement
131 minutes
Director
Joseph Kosinski
Advertisement
Writers
Christopher McQuarrie, Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Peter Craig, Justin Marks
You must be logged in to post a comment Login