Days of Thunder Is Coming Back — and Anne Hathaway Is Riding Shotgun

Tom Cruise has decided that if one impossibly cool character from his past can come roaring back decades later, there is no reason he should stop at one. After spending years proving that Pete “Maverick” Mitchell still had plenty left in the tank, Cruise is returning to another of his signature roles. Cole Trickle is coming back, Days of Thunder is returning in Summer 2028, and Cruise confirmed it himself with a wonderfully simple announcement: “Days of Thunder. Summer 2028.”

And because someone involved in this project has been reading my Christmas list, Anne Hathaway is coming with him. Look, I was already in. You could have told me Tom Cruise was making another Days of Thunder, shown me that green No. 46, and I would have been sitting here asking when tickets went on sale. Adding Hathaway just turns this into something specifically engineered to get my attention.

It also gives the movie something Cruise has never had before: Anne Hathaway as his co-star. Despite both of them spending decades at the top of Hollywood, the two have never made a movie together. That makes this their first on-screen pairing, which somehow makes the whole thing even more interesting.

Cruise returning to Cole Trickle is exciting for the same reason Top Gun: Maverick worked so damn well. He wasn’t simply dusting off an old costume and hoping nostalgia did the heavy lifting. With Maverick, Cruise came back to Pete Mitchell 36 years after the original Top Gun and let the time between movies become part of the story. Maverick was older. He had history, regrets, scars and a world that had changed around him, and the movie understood that the audience had changed too. That makes Cole Trickle a hell of a character to revisit.

The original Days of Thunder arrived in 1990, four years after Top Gun, with Cruise playing a gifted, arrogant NASCAR driver who had all the talent in the world and just enough self-destructive confidence to make using it difficult. There is an obvious question sitting there more than three decades later: Who does that guy become? Cruise has already shown that he understands the difference between bringing back a character and simply recycling one. If Days of Thunder follows the same basic philosophy as Maverick — respect what came before, acknowledge that a hell of a lot of time has passed and then actually give the character somewhere new to go — there could be a real movie here.

Then there is Hathaway, and I make absolutely no attempt to hide my Anne Hathaway bias around here. If she is in something, my interest level goes up immediately, and putting her opposite Cruise in a big, old-school racing movie is not exactly going to cure that condition. More importantly, she makes this feel like something other than Cruise simply running another nostalgia lap. The combination of these two has the potential to give the movie its own identity rather than forcing it to become Top Gun: Maverick with stock cars, and that is exactly what it needs.

Days of Thunder does not need to copy Maverick. It just needs to remember the lesson that movie taught Hollywood: nostalgia gets people through the door, but the movie still has to earn everything that comes after. Between F1 proving audiences will still show up for a big racing movie and Cruise deciding to bring Cole Trickle back, suddenly the track is getting crowded again. Tom Cruise is back as Cole Trickle, Anne Hathaway is riding alongside him, and that green No. 46 is sitting on the track again.

Anything Brad Pitt can do, Tom Cruise can do hanging from an airplane.