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Who, in 2026, expected Tom Cruise to announce a legacy sequel to Days of Thunder? To be sure, the 1990 Tony Scott movie has its devotees, thanks to a sharp script by Hollywood legend Robert Towne and strong performances from Nicole Kidman, Robert Duvall, Michael Rooker, and others. But the movie is very much Top Gun 2.0, a retread of Cruise and Scott’s Air Force picture, just made glossier and more bombastic for being stuck on the ground.
However, it’s that very Top Gun connection that makes Days of Thunder 2 appear to be a viable idea. Few would have thought of Top Gun as anything other than a bit of blockbuster nostalgia inseparable from the 1980s. And yet, Top Gun: Maverick proved to be a huge crowd pleaser, entertaining audiences in 2022 perhaps even more than the original did in 1986. So, with that in mind, maybe Cruise knows what he’s doing when mining surprising properties for legacy sequels. Here are just a few ideas to throw his way…
Risky Business (1983)
Tom Cruise already had a few films under his belt by 1983, including playing Steve Randle in Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Outsiders. But Risky Business did serve as the debut of Tom Cruise as we know him, the ideal Hollywood movie star of the blockbuster era, complete with perfect teeth. Written and directed by Paul Brickman and supplemented by a Tangerine Dream score, Risky Business gave the 1980s their own version of The Graduate, with Cruise playing aimless rich kid Joel Goodsen, who has a coming-of-age experience with a slightly older sex worker named Lana (Rebecca De Mornay). By the end of the movie, Lana and Joel seem to have moved past their initial transactional relationship and will be embarking on a real romance.
A legacy sequel would have to catch up with a much-older Joel who has become the very thing he tried to avoid. He inherited his family’s wealth, which only builds on the job he secured through his father’s connections. Yet, Joel still finds his life unsatisfying, and so when his own wife and children leave him alone to go on a vacation, he decides to relive his past glories, which brings him back into the orbit of Lana, now running an escort service but equally unable to escape her fate. Where the original crackled with youthful energy, the sequel would be full of regret, as Joel and Lana realize that their love was never enough to bridge the class gap between them.
Legend (1985)
The passing of Tim Curry has many cinephiles thinking about Legend, Ridley Scott‘s gauzy fantasy film. Curry played the Darkness, essentially the Devil himself, infecting a world that can only be saved by the rustic Jack O’ the Green (Cruise) and Princess Lili (Mia Sara). Obviously, Curry wouldn’t be able to replicate his incredible performance. But as Prometheus and Alien: Covenant show, Scott has no problem revisiting his past work, and finding new and interesting things to say beyond the mere nostalgia buttons.
The original film had an ecological message, positioning Jack as the defender of nature. In the official ending of that movie (several alternates were also shot), Jack vanquishes the Darkness and proposes to Lili, a marriage that will bring peace to the land. The legacy sequel to Legend could reveal that Lili never truly escaped the Darkness’s thrall, and that she and Jack have been corrupted. With the land once again in peril, a new hero needs to rise and finish the work that Jack and Lili started, giving grumpy old Ridley plenty of space to (rightly!) grouch about industrialization, big corporations, and the continuing failure to save the environment.
The Color of Money (1986)
The most obvious Cruise movie on this list is The Color of Money, because The Color of Money is itself a legacy sequel! In 1986, Martin Scorsese adapted Walter Tevis’ 1984 novel The Color of Money, which was a sequel to Tevis’s 1959 novel The Hustler. The Hustler, of course, was turned into a 1961 movie that starred Paul Newman as Fast Eddie, an up-and-coming pool shark who challenged the old champion Minnesota Fats. In Scorsese’s movie, Newman reprises his role as Eddie, now an established pool master who must take on the challenge of Vincent (Cruise) a new challenger. While Eddie tries to hang onto his youth and defeat Vincent, he also tries to warn the younger man against following in his footsteps.
It would be the most natural thing in the world to simply continue the narrative for a third movie about the legacy of Minnesota Fats. Now, Vincent has become the old hand, who has all the respect that Minnesota and Fast Eddie once enjoyed, but he also has the same problems, despite the way that Eddie tried to dissuade him. A newcomer arrives in town and makes his own claim to greatness. Can Vincent succeed where his predecessors failed and teach the young one a thing or two?
Magnolia (1999)
Shortly after Days of Thunder, Cruise’s career took a surprising turn. Instead of simply reinforcing his position as a reliable box office draw, Cruise endeavored to be a respected actor, and put himself in the hands of some of the greatest auteurs of his generation. That’s how we get him playing a sexually frustrated doctor in a fantastic New York City for Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut or as the chilly assassin Vincent in Michael Mann‘s Collateral. The most interesting of these performances may be that of Frank T.J. Mackey in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s delirious and sprawling Magnolia.
As Mackey, Cruise interrogated his own screen persona, playing a hyper-masculine figure who rallies a group of disaffected young men in seminars entitled Seduce and Destroy. Over the course of Magnolia, we see how Frank’s misogyny stems in part from that of his father, a powerful television producer who abandoned his sick wife, leaving Frank to care for his dying mother alone. A legacy sequel could involve Frank reconciling with his past behavior, long after his father’s own death, while a whole new generation of young men pick up the Seduce and Destroy methods that he once taught. Would Anderson make a sequel to Magnolia? That seems unlikely, but in a world where David Fincher is making a sequel to Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, anything is possible.
Minority Report (2002)
Few Cruise movies lend themselves to sequels better than Minority Report, his first collaboration with Steven Spielberg. Adapted from the Philip K. Dick story in a script written by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, Minority Report takes place in a future where precognitives allow the police to see crimes before they happen. When Chief John Anderton of the Precrime Unit (Cruise) is charged with murder, he must not only prove that didn’t commit the crime, but that he wouldn’t commit the crime. In doing so, Anderton reveals a conspiracy that leads all the way to the unit’s director, Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow).
Apropos of a Spielberg film, Minority Report ends on a happy note, with the precogs freed from the job they were forced to do and allowed to live a life of peace. But as demonstrated by The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg can get pretty nasty when he does a sequel. So a Minority Report sequel would involve Anderton getting called back into service after a new variation of the precog division gets put in place. When another young agent finds himself falsely accused, Anderton’s the one person who knows how to upset the system, and bring about justice once and for all.
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