It's Official, a 'Days of Thunder' Sequel is Coming. Here's When

The long-rumored follow-up to 1990's Days of Thunder now has a firm release date and a confirmed co-lead, moving the project past speculation and toward production. Tom Cruise announced it himself. In a teaser video posted to social media, he appears alongside Anne Hathaway next to a NASCAR race car with "Cole Trickle" printed on the roof above the driver's seat.

The sequel will hit theaters on June 2, 2028, with Cruise reprising his role and Hathaway joining the cast. Jerry Bruckheimer returns as a producer so you can be sure it'll be quite the spectacle. Sundance award winner Jonathan Levine is attached to direct. No confirmed title yet.

Fan pressure for a Days of Thunder revival has built steadily since Top Gun: Maverick returned Cruise to the box office at full afterburner. The original, essentially Top Gun transplanted into NASCAR, has never been mistaken for a good movie, but it remains fun and endlessly quotable — "Rubbin' is racin'" among its more durable lines. The reboot leans on that same nostalgia the way Maverick did, betting that audiences will show up for a sequel that outperforms the memory of the first film.

The commercial logic tracks with last year's F1: The Movie, which demonstrated appetite for high-budget racing cinema. There is a caveat baked into that comparison, however. The lion's share of the Formula 1 film's revenue came from a global audience, and NASCAR is a tougher sell overseas than F1. The Top Gun reboot proved American-flavored spectacle can still draw internationally, but the stock-car setting narrows the built-in appeal outside the United States.

As of the latest update, the sequel still needed a lead actor to take the wheel alongside Cruise.

The original film carries one of the more excessive production stories from a golden age of Hollywood spending. Producers Don Simpson and Bruckheimer bought out an entire section of their Daytona Beach hotel to convert into a gym. Production costs more than doubled, and the reviews were unkind, yet the movie still turned a technical profit. That budget bought footage of Cruise and rival driver Michael Rooker beating a Ford Taurus and a Chevy Lumina to pieces on a Florida beach — a sequence the reboot would do well to keep, much as Maverick brought back its beach volleyball scene.

Cruise's star power did the heavy lifting the first time around. The sequel appears set to lean on the same formula: a familiar face, a proven producer, and a director with festival credibility. Whether Cruise proves as effective a crew chief in production as he was a fictional hot shoe in 1990 remains the open question heading toward the 2028 release.

For now, the pieces are falling into place. A date is locked, the co-lead is set, and the director's chair is filled. The remaining gap is the second driver — the role that determines who lines up next to Cole Trickle when the sequel finally reaches the grid.