Tom Cruise confirmed Days of Thunder 2 on August 29 with a video posted to his own X account, standing beside a bright yellow and lime-green stock car at Daytona alongside his new co-star, Anne Hathaway. “Now what?” Cruise asks in the clip. Hathaway, visibly pregnant, answers: “Now what? I’m gonna have this baby and then we’re gonna make this movie.” Cruise closes the reel with a direct line to fans: “We’re coming out summer of 2028. Don’t be late.”
Two days later, Randy Quaid, who played team owner Tim Daland in the 1990 original, told his own followers not to be excited about it at all.
The Original’s Numbers, and Why This Sequel Carries Weight
Days of Thunder isn’t a nostalgia play built on a forgotten title. The 1990 film grossed $157.9 million worldwide against a $60 million budget, opening to $29.8 million in ticket sales in its first nine days, a number contemporary sports-business coverage credited with pulling NASCAR itself into mainstream box-office territory for the first time. ESPN and the sport’s own sponsors treated the film’s release as a genuine inflection point for the sport’s television ratings and advertising revenue.
The film has held onto something rarer than box office: a self-sustaining cult following inside NASCAR itself. Teams have run paint schemes inspired by the movie decades after release. Kyle Larson brought back the Mello Yello scheme from the film for a Darlington throwback race, citing the movie by name as part of the reason. Racing writers still describe it as the definitive stock-car movie, the one film that treated the sport’s actual fans as its intended audience rather than outsiders looking in. That’s the property Cruise is stepping back into, 38 years after the original, with Jerry Bruckheimer producing again and Jonathan Levine directing.
Quaid’s Objection
Quaid didn’t hold back. “Anne Hathaway is a leftist, woke, horrible choice for DAYS OF THUNDER NASCAR audience who are MAGA,” he wrote on X. “The sexy older chick for Tom in this film needs to be Nicole. That’s the casting that would sell the idea.” He went further in a follow-up post, telling Cruise: “We need Nicole back. Don’t be a p*ssy, Tom Cruise. You need the original girl. It’s not personal; it’s filmmaking. Anne isn’t sexy, because and if you haven’t noticed, she’s pregnant.”
Quaid also flagged what he called a rushed production timeline, comparing it to the scramble behind the original film’s release: “It’s interesting because when we made the first one there was also a rush to get it out; editors slept in the cutting room on shifts. This is a weird thing, like they want it to come out and tank.”
Nicole Kidman, who played Cruise’s love interest in the original and married him the same year the film released, isn’t attached to the sequel. The two divorced in 2001 and haven’t acted together since. Hathaway’s confirmed role is different from Kidman’s altogether: not a love-interest doctor, but a racecar team owner and engineer, a position of authority inside the sport rather than a romantic subplot running alongside it.
“I Can’t Stop Laughing”
Quaid wasn’t alone in reading Hathaway’s casting through a political lens. Pop culture analyst Byl Holte posted his own reaction to the news, tying it to Hathaway’s earlier 2026 release, End of Oak Street: “Anne Hathaway just joined Tom Cruise in the ‘Days of Thunder’ sequel as (brace yourselves): A TEAM OWNER AND AN ENGINEER! I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING. She just tanked ‘End of Oak Street’ with her bull*** female-empowerment character. Now she’s gonna ruin this one too.”
Not Cruise’s First Legacy Swap
This isn’t the first time Cruise has retooled a decades-old franchise’s female lead for a legacy sequel. Top Gun: Maverick brought in Jennifer Connelly as a new love interest while Kelly McGillis, the original film’s female lead, wasn’t asked back. That decision drew its own round of fan criticism at the time. It didn’t slow the film down: Maverick went on to gross over $1.5 billion worldwide, one of the biggest box-office results of Cruise’s career. Whether Days of Thunder 2 follows that same path with a different cast swap remains the open question heading toward its June 2028 release.
Robert Duvall, who played Cruise’s mentor Harry Hogge in the original, died earlier this year and won’t appear in the sequel. It’s unclear which other original cast members, including Quaid, will have any involvement at all, though Quaid’s public criticism of the studio’s choice makes his own return an unlikely bet.
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