Start your engines, because Tom Cruise just did the most Tom Cruise thing imaginable. On Saturday morning, hours before NASCAR’s regular-season finale, the actor turned up at an empty Daytona International Speedway, leaned against a stock car, and casually confirmed the sequel race fans have been begging for since 1990.
Yes, Days of Thunder is getting a follow-up. Paramount Pictures has dated the film for June 2, 2028, and it will be shot for IMAX and released exclusively in theaters in formats including Dolby Cinema and 4DX. The car in the announcement image carries the Cole Trickle nameplate and a green-and-yellow paint job that nods to the Mello Yello scheme Trickle raced in the original. If you know, you know.
“Rubbin’, Son, Is Racin’” Days of Thunder Is Officially Back on the Big Screen
The bigger surprise? Cruise isn’t going it alone. Anne Hathaway is co-starring as a racecar team owner and engineer, which means the Princess Diaries alum turned Oscar winner is about to become NASCAR’s newest power broker. Hathaway, who is expecting her third child, brought the announcement video’s best moment with a very practical bit of scheduling: “I’m gonna have this baby, then we’re gonna make this movie.” Cruise, ever the showman, signed off with a promise to audiences: “We’re coming out summer of 2028. Don’t be late.”
Behind the camera, Jonathan Levine (Long Shot, 50/50) is directing from a script by Will Staples, with Cruise producing alongside Jerry Bruckheimer and Tommy Harper. Bruckheimer’s involvement is the real tell here. The man produced the 1990 original and just came off the Brad Pitt Formula 1 movie, so he knows exactly how loud this needs to be.
Here’s the fun part about the first film: critics hated it. Directed by the late Tony Scott and written by Robert Towne from a story Cruise conceived himself, Days of Thunder made $82.6 million domestically and $157.9 million worldwide, and it got roasted inside the racing world for its wild exaggerations. Then something funny happened. It became scripture. Robert Duvall’s crew chief Harry Hogge gave the sport its most quoted line ever, “Rubbin’, son, is racin’”, and the movie introduced stock-car racing to an audience that had almost no exposure to it before that summer. It also introduced Cruise to Nicole Kidman, who played Dr. Claire Lewicki and became his wife for 11 years.
Current drivers are thrilled. Four-time Cup Series champion Jeff Gordon, now vice chairman at Hendrick Motorsports, has publicly lobbied for this sequel for years, and he and Cruise have been friends since Cruise turned up at Gordon’s 2015 retirement banquet. Levine and Staples were already doing homework, attending July’s Quaker State 400 at EchoPark Speedway.
Cruise doesn’t do sequels often, which is what makes this land so hard. Outside of Mission: Impossible and the two Jack Reacher films, Top Gun: Maverick was his only legacy follow-up, and it grossed $1.5 billion worldwide to become the biggest hit of his career. This is also the first major piece of IP he’s tackling after winding down Mission: Impossible.
As for Hathaway, she is having an absolutely absurd year. She’s had four films in theaters in 2026 (Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey, and The End of Oak Street), closes out the year with the Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity, just wrapped the Adam Driver military drama Alone at Dawn, and has a third Princess Diaries in the works. Adding a NASCAR blockbuster to that pile feels almost unfair.
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