Over the weekend, we learned that Tom Cruise would be officially back in the driver’s seat as Cole Trickel for a sequel to “Days of Thunder” alongside Anne Hathaway (“The Odyssey”) and to promote the NASCAR project helmed by Jonathan Levine, the actor recently spoke with sports world podcaster Pat McAfee at Daytona and revealed his thoughts on the recent handshake promise to exhibiotors by Paramount-Skydance‘s David Ellison to keep releasing 30 feature films per year after the merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.
Cruise’s basic reaction to the whole thing, “I think it’s awesome!” The actor telling the podcast host (via Variety) he believes Paramount/Ellison hold up their end. “You know, here’s the thing. They’re going to deliver 30 movies. It’s a community to me. It’s not an industry. The people in these studios are not just people in the studios. They’re my family. I know we’re going to get those 30 movies. I want us all to come together as a community to help make those 30 movies. It’s not just going to be, you know, Paramount doing it. Everyone’s going to need all the help of every artist to be able to do it.”
We can’t overstate that Cruise’s glowing optimism is indeed infectous and charming, however, the realities of the industry are hard to ignore. With 52 weeks in a year, the likeihood of Paramount and Warner Bros. projects going head-to-head on mutiple weekends trying to edge each other out at the box office feels less likely when you consider the millions of marketing dollars (sometimes hundreds of millions per month) poured into modern campaigns and we don’t exactly see the merger becoming some baston of compeition between the two studios.
In our humble opinion, the more likely scenario is that Paramount ends up releasing the bulk of the features in theaters and Warner Bros./HBO starts to becoming a content pipeline for Paramount+. The company’s main streaming service still starved for more eyeballs/viewership (Taylor Sheridan can only do so much to woo subscribers with his new deal with NBCUniversal on the horizon) in comparison to others and we could envision it potentially is combined with HBO Max (similar to how Disney is handling their multiple streaming apps ala Disney+ and Hulu) with a limited amount going to exhibitors and other projects going to streaming (not hard to imainge an entertainment company of that size wanting to minimize overstaturation when they are wrangling two legacy studios and assumed downsizing of WBD post-merger as well). That number of 30 theatrical titles sounds very tempting and promising, but the reality of that actually happening feels more wishful than anything else.
You can feel free to watch that interaction between Cruise and McAfee below, as the actor’s latest effort the political disaster comedy “Digger” heads into theaters on October 1 and that “Days of Thunder” sequel already has a prime release date of June 2, 2028. Stay tuned as more casting announcements are expected before the end of the year, we’ll keep our fingers crossed that Cruise’s supporting cast members John C. Reilly, Cary Elwes, and Michael Rooker get a call for to return for “Days of Thunder 2.”
