NASCAR is putting together a fleet of more than 80 stock cars for Paramount’s Days of Thunder sequel, the series’ chief executive, Steve O’Donnell, said in an interview published on October 12. That is 20 more than the 60 race cars bought for the 1990 original, roughly a third larger, and the film is still more than a year and a half from theaters.
O’Donnell did not break down how the cars will be split between racing footage, stunts and background work, and nobody has said which tracks will appear on screen. The size of the order still says plenty about how closely the sanctioning body is tied to Tom Cruise’s return as Cole Trickle.
What is confirmed so far
Cruise and Anne Hathaway announced the project on social media on August 29, 2026, with a stock car painted in Cole Trickle’s old livery and the words “Summer 2028” on its side. Paramount has dated the film for June 2, 2028. Hathaway will play a race team owner and engineer.
Behind the camera, Jonathan Levine was reported in July to be in talks to direct from a script by Will Staples, with filming expected to start in early 2027. Cameras had not rolled as of the late-August announcement. The project first surfaced in November 2024, when Cruise was reported to be in final talks to star in and produce it.
Drivers are already involved. Dale Earnhardt Jr. has described meeting members of the creative team and giving them notes on how the sport should look, and Cup Series driver Carson Hocevar has said he has been passing along ideas and in-car footage from his own career.
Why NASCAR wants this film
The series made its case well before any deal existed. “The more places we can expose NASCAR to with a broader audience, the better,” O’Donnell, then the chief operating officer, said in February 2024, when a sequel was still only a rumor. He tied that ambition to Netflix promoting its docuseries NASCAR: Full Speed in Times Square.
A feature film reaches a different crowd from a streaming documentary. The 1990 movie pushed stock car racing into mainstream pop culture, and its fictional paint schemes still turn up on real cars at Darlington’s throwback weekend more than three decades later.
How the 1990 film used real race cars
The first film grew out of a single test day. On January 3, 1987, Cruise and Paul Newman drove a Busch Grand National car for Hendrick Motorsports at Daytona, and Cruise began pitching a racing story to team owner Rick Hendrick over dinner that night.
Hendrick then supplied the Chevrolet Lumina stock cars that stood in for Cole Trickle, Rowdy Burns and Russ Wheeler. To get genuine race footage, the movie cars were entered in real events three times:
- Phoenix, late 1989, where Bobby Hamilton qualified fifth and led a lap before his engine failed
- The 1990 Daytona 500, with Hamilton and Tommy Ellis in unscored entries that ran the opening 40 laps
- Darlington in 1990, where Hut Stricklin and Greg Sacks were pulled early after Sacks broke a crankshaft
Tony Scott directed for the producing team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and Days of Thunder opened on June 27, 1990, on 2,307 screens in the US and Canada. It led its first weekend with $15.5 million and finished with $82.7 million in North America and $157.7 million worldwide. Its planned $35 million budget had nearly doubled to about $60 million during a shoot that wrapped three months late. Critics were mixed, but the film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Sound.
The racing-film bar has moved
Bruckheimer’s more recent racing picture shows how much the ceiling has risen. F1, starring Brad Pitt and filmed during real Grand Prix weekends with the cooperation of the sport’s governing body, the FIA, took $634.1 million worldwide in 2025. That is about four times what Days of Thunder earned ($634.1 million divided by $157.6 million is 4.02), and it made F1 the highest-grossing auto racing film ever. Its director, Joseph Kosinski, even floated a crossover in June 2025 in which Trickle and Pitt’s driver turn out to be old rivals.
Building cars at scale is how NASCAR can offer the sequel a version of that same access, on its own terms rather than through borrowed team equipment.
What happens next
From today, October 16, 2026, the release is 595 days away. The next milestones are a confirmed director and a start of filming, which reports have pointed to early 2027. The car build is already moving ahead of both, and the movie is booked into theaters on June 2, 2028, almost exactly 38 years after Cole Trickle first took the green flag.
Further reading
Image: Luis Ochea, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
