Tom Cruise: Shaping His Legacy, Dodging Trump, and Coconut Cake Mythology

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Tom Cruise has spent the past few days quietly reshaping the next chapter of his legend, on screen and off, and the headlines are finally catching up. According to Fox News Digital and a widely echoed Page Six report, the long gestating Doug Liman space movie that would have launched Cruise to the International Space Station has effectively been scrapped because he refused to ask President Donald Trump for the NASA coordination the project needed. Those outlets report that Cruise, who has kept his politics famously private, did not want to owe Trump a favor and never made the call, and the film died in orbit before it ever left the ground. Other outlets like Consequence of Sound and the Hindustan Times are treating this as plausible but not formally confirmed by Cruise or NASA, so for now it sits in that zone where Hollywood insider gossip feels very true but remains technically unverified.

At the same time, the Washington Post has already reported that Cruise turned down a 2025 Kennedy Center Honor from Trump, citing scheduling conflicts, a move that now looks more pointed in light of the space movie story and could age into a key footnote in the political chapter of his biography.

Publicly, Cruise has been visible in far more comfortable territory: as the industrys tireless cheerleader. Lainey Gossip reports that on December 11 he turned up in Culver City for a Los Angeles screening of Kokuho, Japans submission for the Best International Feature Film Oscar, lending his marquee glow to a foreign film awards campaign and reinforcing his ongoing role as cinemas global ambassador.

Online, the Tom Cruise coconut cake mythology is back in circulation. Lainey Gossip’s celebrity social media roundup notes that this is the time of year when Hollywood types start flexing their status by posting about receiving Cruises famously rich white coconut bundt cake, a small but enduring part of his off camera lore.

Meanwhile, in the background, Moneycontrol and other outlets reiterate that Cruise is now focused on his next major collaboration with director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, a project already carrying awards buzz and likely to matter far more to his long term filmography than the space movie that got away.

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