Tom Cruise "Will Surprise The World" With His New Comedy, Teases Oscar-Winning Director

Tom Cruise specializes in thrilling audiences with insane action-movie stunts, but his next project will delight and perhaps shock fans with a whole different type of craziness, teases its director.

Alejandro González Iñárritu promised in a recent IndieWire interview that Cruise’s performance in their forthcoming untitled dark comedy movie will “surprise the world,” adding, “People will see a new kind of thing.”

The Oscar-winning Revenant director also spoke in glowing terms about his working relationship with Cruise:

His manners, his understanding, his passion, and his integrity, and the way he prepares. He loves the process. Filmmaking has been his life for 40 years. I have never seen somebody so devoted. I was happy to share with him that passion. And at the same time, we built an incredible relation of mutual trust.

Iñárritu then talked about the fun time he had with Cruise and the rest of the ensemble cast on the set of the film, which is scheduled for release October 2, 2026.

We had a blast. It was challenging, but it was wild comedy. And we laugh a lot. We have a wild time.

There Will Be No Stunts In Cruise’s Untitled 2026 Comedy

Iñárritu’s prior remarks about his untitled 2026 movie make it plain there will be no Mission: Impossible-type stunts for Cruise this time around, though there will still be a certain measure of insanity (via Deadline):

The thing that I can tell you. This is a wild comedy of catastrophic proportions. It’s insane. He makes me laugh every day. The range that I discovered working with Tom is unprecedented for me as a director.

Cruise himself called working with the two-time Oscar-winning Iñárritu an “extraordinary experience” (via Today). The movie’s stacked cast includes Anatomy of a Fall star Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sophie Wilde, Riz Ahmed, Jesse Plemons, and House of the Dragon‘s Emma D’Arcy.

Iñárritu and Cruise’s wild comedy film wrapped shooting back in May after six months, and the director says it will be in post-production until March. Cruise’s release slate is up in the air after the film comes out in October 2026.

Reported and/or rumored future Cruise projects include Top Gun 3, a World War 2 movie titled Broadsword, a remake of Clint Eastwood’s The Gauntlet, the long-awaited Edge of Tomorrow 2, the even-longer-awaited Days of Thunder 2, and a long-threatened collaboration with SpaceX that plans to send Cruise into orbit, literally.

The Russian movie The Challenge beat Cruise to space, filming scenes on the International Space Station.

The Mission: Impossible star’s one other project, the underwater adventure movie Deeper, is reportedly facing budget issues and may be in limbo. This after Cruise and reported co-star Ana de Armas were said to have already begun training for the film’s challenging underwater scenes.

Cruise’s long-running Mission: Impossible franchise appears to have wrapped up with this summer’s The Final Reckoning, which grossed $598 million on a reported budget of up to $400 million, but Cruise has edged away from Ethan Hunt before, only to return with a vengeance.

Details about the plot of Cruise’s stunt-free untitled 2026 comedy are being kept under wraps, but the film’s impressive ensemble would seem to imply it’s not a star-vehicle like most of his other recent movies.

Iñárritu famously helped his Revenant star Leonardo DiCaprio win his first Oscar, with help from real bison liver and a fake horse carcass. Cruise has been nominated for an Oscar three times but never won, his last nomination coming for his supporting performance in 2000’s Magnolia.