Paramount Bets a 2028 Tentpole on Days of Thunder

Tom Cruise and Anne Hathaway set Days of Thunder 2 for June 2, 2028, in a Daytona clip posted Saturday. They leaned on a yellow-green stock car, and Paramount said the movie will be shot for IMAX and held in theaters, including Dolby Cinema and 4DX.

That is the Maverick playbook pointed at a 1990 NASCAR film that made money, burned a producing deal, and never grew a sequel. Cruise is back as Cole Trickle. Hathaway is billed as a team owner and engineer. The date is 21 months away.

A Yellow Car and a June 2028 Date

Cruise posted the clip himself on August 29 with a six-word caption, “Days of Thunder. Summer 2028,” and tagged Paramount, IMAX, Dolby, NASCAR, and Hathaway. The car in the frame carried the sequel title. Hathaway, visibly pregnant and in a cowboy hat, looked at him after the pose and said, “Now what? Let’s make the movie!”

She then said she should have the baby and then make the film. Cruise told her that was a good idea, announced summer 2028, and added, “Don’t be late!” She laughed and asked if he was sure he wanted to go with that.

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The joke lands because the calendar is long on purpose. Paramount is treating this as Cruise’s next production, not a cameo stacked onto someone else’s shoot. Jonathan Levine is directing. Will Staples wrote the script. Cruise is producing with Jerry Bruckheimer and Tommy Harper, the same producing trio that steered Top Gun: Maverick.

By opening day Cruise will be 65, playing a man he first drove at 27. Thirty-eight years will sit between the two films, two years longer than the wait between Top Gun and Maverick. The original opened in late June 1990 after Paramount shoved it off a May 23 date.

The 1990 Film That Never Became a Franchise

Days of Thunder was sold as Top Gun on wheels. Tony Scott directed. Don Simpson and Bruckheimer produced. Robert Towne kept rewriting while cameras rolled, at one point reading new pages to Cruise over a headset as the car went around the track. The shoot slipped from a February wrap toward May, and the May 23 opening moved to June 27.

It still did a $15.5 million opening weekend and finished with $157.9 million worldwide on a $60 million budget, $82.7 million of that in North America. Those are hit numbers until you stack them against what Paramount wanted, which was another Top Gun. Five months after release, on November 16, 1990, the studio ended its exclusive deal with Simpson and Bruckheimer. Budget fights and a thin development slate were the reasons given at the time.

Cruise had told Rolling Stone he wanted to take an audience for a ride at 200 miles an hour and have them live to tell about it. He got the smell of burning rubber and a marriage to Nicole Kidman, who played the doctor. He did not get a sequel. Talks about bringing Trickle back only got serious in November 2024, after Maverick had already rewritten what a late Cruise sequel could be worth.

The loudest shrug since Saturday is that this title does not carry that much affection outside the garage. Ghost and The Hunt for Red October did more for Paramount in 1990. A legacy sequel needs a public that already misses the first movie. Thunder’s public is real. It is also smaller than the one that put Maverick over the top.

Why a Comedy Director Has the Wheel

Levine is a strange name if you came for Tony Scott’s smoke and lens flares. His features include the cancer dramedy 50/50, the zombie romance Warm Bodies, the Charlize Theron-Seth Rogen campaign comedy Long Shot, and the Amy Schumer road picture Snatched. He has also directed episodes of Nine Perfect Strangers, the Hulu series that stars Kidman.

Paramount is not handing him a $177 million jet movie on a whim. The hire is a bet on Mr. Irrelevant, the John Tuggle football drama he made for the studio with David Corenswet, dated for a Christmas Day wide release this year after strong test screenings in the spring. If that movie lands, Levine goes to Daytona as the in-house sports guy. If it does not, he still has the keys to Cruise’s next film.

Staples is not a NASCAR lifer either. He co-wrote Without Remorse and has credits on The Right Stuff and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. He has spent the past year in the actual garage, which is the part of this hire that looks like homework rather than nostalgia. Joseph Kosinski, who directed Maverick and then Brad Pitt’s F1 film, is the name a lot of ticket buyers wanted. Paramount went the other way.

Hathaway’s Job Is Owner and Engineer

Kidman was the doctor who pulled glass from Trickle’s eye. Hathaway is listed as a racecar team owner and engineer, a job with a radio and a payroll. That is the one story change Paramount has been willing to say out loud, and it is the one that has already started an argument.

Some of that argument is just people wanting Kidman back in the passenger seat. Some of it is uglier, and it started within hours of the reel. The wiser objection is simpler. If the sequel is only Cole Trickle again, older and still cocky, it is a cover band. If Hathaway is actually running the team, the movie has a second engine.

WHAT IS LOCKED IN

• The date: Paramount has put Days of Thunder 2 on June 2, 2028, as a theatrical title filmed for IMAX.
• The formats: Dolby Cinema and 4DX are on the plan, with no streaming window announced beside the theater run.
• The leads: Cruise reprises Cole Trickle; Hathaway plays a team owner and engineer, not the 1990 doctor role.
• The shop: Levine directs, Staples wrote the script, and Cruise produces with Bruckheimer and Harper.

Plot pages are still in the garage. No supporting cast has been confirmed, so Robert Duvall’s Harry Hogge, Randy Quaid’s Tim Daland, and Kidman’s Claire Lewicki are all open questions. Hathaway said the shoot waits until after the baby. That lines up with a start in early 2027, which is the timetable that has been circulating since Levine’s deal.

She is coming off a stacked stretch that already included The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey, and The End of Oak Street, with Verity still dated for October. Cruise has Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger in the same season. The 2028 slot is the one they are protecting.

Daytona Already Heard the Pitch

NASCAR is supporting the sequel the way it supported the original, which means tracks, cars, and drivers, not just a logo on a poster. Cruise did not only post a clip on Saturday. He went into the drivers’ meeting at Daytona International Speedway with series executive Steve O’Donnell and talked to the Cup garage before the night race.

The groundwork started much earlier than the reel.

HOW THE SEQUEL GOT TO DAYTONA

1. November 2024: Cruise is in talks with Paramount to star in and produce a Days of Thunder follow-up, while a Top Gun: Maverick sequel is also in development.
2. February 18, 2025: Jeff Gordon, vice chairman of Hendrick Motorsports, says after the Daytona 500 that he has spoken with Cruise and wants Hendrick involved if the film happens.
3. November 2025: Staples is at the Phoenix championship weekend meeting teams and drivers, the first public sign a writer is actually in the garage.
4. February 2026: Staples is at the Daytona 500 and later at team shops near Charlotte; Dale Earnhardt Jr. later said those talks ran close to a year and included a meeting at Earnhardt’s North Carolina place.
5. July 22, 2026: Paramount puts Levine in talks to direct, calling the film Cruise’s next production, with filming aimed at early 2027.
6. August 29, 2026: Cruise and Hathaway post the Daytona reel, Paramount dates the movie June 2, 2028, and Cruise addresses the Cup drivers the same day.

Gordon had already put the wish on the record. “I’ve absolutely talked to Tom about it because I want him to do the project, and we want to be a part of it if it were to happen,” he said after William Byron won the 2025 Daytona 500.

Great to see @TomCruise in Daytona and very excited for the Days of Thunder sequel!

Jeff Gordon, Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman, on X

Earnhardt told Staples to lean on the original as much as possible, which is the garage’s actual brief. They want the old movie’s dust and radio chatter, not a generic sports picture with NASCAR stickers. Hendrick’s shops helped the first film. Gordon’s February comment was a bid to do that again. The sport has spent years watching Formula One get the prestige documentary and then the Pitt movie. This is NASCAR trying to take a turn in the same theater.

Formula One Got There First

Bruckheimer already cashed a racing check last year. F1, directed by Kosinski and starring Pitt, took $189.6 million in North America and $634.1 million worldwide, the highest-grossing auto racing film on record. Apple and Warner Bros. put it out. Bruckheimer produced. A sequel is already in the works.

That is the film Days of Thunder 2 now has to drive next to, and it is the part of this bet that does not fit on a yellow car.

THE TWO RACING HITS THE SEQUEL HAS TO LIVE BESIDE

Maverick did that on a $177 million production budget for Paramount, with Cruise and Bruckheimer producing and Kosinski directing real jets. F1 did it with the same director-producer pairing and a live Formula One season as the backlot. Days of Thunder 2 has Cruise, Bruckheimer, Harper, NASCAR, and IMAX. It does not have Kosinski, and it does not have a first film that the whole world already quotes.

Paramount is still going. The studio watched Maverick print money off a 36-year gap and is now asking Thunder to do a version of that trick with a 38-year gap, a comedy director coming off a football picture, and a co-star whose job is to own the team rather than patch the driver. NASCAR has already opened the garage. The Cup drivers have already heard the speech. Hathaway has a baby to have, and then a movie to make, and Cruise has already told her not to be late.