Sounds like it has the Dale Earnhardt Jr. stamp of approval.
This past weekend, Tom Cruise announced that Days of Thunder 2 is officially in production and coming in 2028, and he will reprise his role as NASCAR driver Cole Trickle. Anne Hathaway will co-star, playing a team owner and engineer.
They shared the news via a post on Instagram, as they banter back and forth about how to reveal it, before eventually getting out of the way and revealing a green race car with the title and release year on it. Of course, Hathaway is visibly pregnant, and she joked that she had to have her baby before they started filming but she would be ready soon and they’re looking forward to it:
There have been rumors for a while now that something was coming, and Dale Jr. apparently knows a lot about it, as he’s been working with the guy who is developing the story and helping him learn about all things NASCAR.
During his recent Ask Jr. segment for the Dale Jr. Download podcast, he explained that the guy had actually visited his western town on his property in North Carolina, and had tons of questions for him about the storyline and how it would all work in the real world of racing:
“So I met with the guy who sort of developing the story for ‘Days of Thunder 2’ back at Phoenix at the end of last year… he came to Phoenix, and a lot of us met with him, and I met with him and so this has been going for a while. This this fella that I gave my number to, we’ve been in contact and communication.
He’s come out to the western town and we sat down in my western town just talking racing. Great guy, super nice. And so he’s like, ‘Man, I need to talk to you about racing. I got questions.’ And I’m like, ‘Anything you need, call me. Come down to Charlotte, or come to Western town, whatever.’ So he comes down to the Western town, we sit down for an hour or two, probably longer.
And him just, ‘What’s this about? What does this mean? What does this do? Tell me about this? What if the driver did this? What if what if I wrote a guy into the story that was like this, what would he do? What would he say?'”
Jr. explained that the team behind the movie is working really hard to make it as authentic as they can:
“You know, so it’s been super, super fun to feel like you’re helping these folks understand. And I’ve had some great meetings and conversations with them around the movie, and have known that it’s been coming together for quite some time.”
Jr. then spoke about how he’s met Tom Cruise twice in his life, once when he was a kid in the 80s when they were working on the first movie, and Cruise actually wanted Dale Sr. to be in it. That obviously didn’t happen, but it’s a really cool story you can read about HERE.
More recently when Cruise was at Daytona International Speedway this past weekend to promote the movie, Jr. met him again, and he says he’s really “excited” about the movie and he told the developer that they needed to keep as much as they can from the original movie and lean into that nostalgia:
“I’m excited about it. I am thrilled that they’re wanting to do this. There will be some things that they can’t lean into with the old movie, but they’ll be some things that they can, and I told him, I’m like, ‘Man, you’ve got to lean on that original film as much as possible. People are gonna wanna see easter eggs and kind of these hidden stories.’
It just needs to kind of tie into the original as well as possible, and it should. I mean, with what I’ve heard about it, it’s it’s gonna be a lot of fun so. I can’t wait to see it come together.”
If Jr. is already signing off on it, I have to think this is going to be pretty good. He must know a decent amount about the storyline and what they’re going to do with it, and he’s a huge fan of the original, so I trust he’s given them some great advice.
Jr. also told a cool story about how he lived six miles from the barn that’s in the original movie, and he would go sit in a field across the way and watch what they were doing. He could never get too close, so he didn’t really have a clue what he was seeing, but man, it’s kind of crazy to think all these years later they’re going to do a sequel with Cruise and keep the story going. Cruise has a good track record (pun very much intended) with sequels, so we’ll see.
Maybe we could even get a Jr. appearance in it, too…
