Recently I heard that NASA confirmed their plan to work with Tom Cruise and Elon Musk's SpaceX on a film that would be shot in outer space.
I was amazed with Hollywood CGI effects shown in recent films, like the Planet of the Apes movies. It seems to me that using CGI technology for simulating space would save a lot of money compared to planning a movie in space.
So why spend these space expenses instead of using CGI?
Everyone and their dog will go see the publicity stunt that is the first movie made in real space by a famous actor, headed by the world's foremost space agency and the world's richest egomaniac... Considering going to space now only costs in the low hundreds of millions and some movies produce over 1 billion in returns, you’re looking at a pretty good risk-to-profit ratio.
Much like the recent probe launched by Dubai to Mars that only cost 200 million, a project almost entirely only done for advertising/marketing/inspiring STEM among their own youths, this movie project could and will be a huge advertising for all the above mentioned groups, and importantly youths.
At least it’ll be spun off that way.
In the end, it’s a way for Tom Cruise and Elon Musk to gloat and show off, and potentially make a huge profit.
Other than the publicity stunt, which it most definitely is when compared to the cost of CGI, there is one thing we can't believably CGI away: microgravity.
When actors are in harnesses to simulate microgravity, you can generally tell. Also, their hair will still obey the laws of gravity, as will any object they interact with. That doesn't matter much when it's one small shot in a movie, but it does very much matter if the movie spends a significant time in microgravity and is aiming for some degree of realism.
The best way to inprove the realism is by building a set on a plane which goes in freefall (better known as the Vomit Comet. It creates believable microgravity for the actors and their surroundings (e.g. Apollo 13 used it to great effect), but a plane cannot freefall very long and you end up with short scenes (or frequent cuts).
Apollo 13 behind the scenes footage for the microgravity scenes.
If you compare Apollo 13 to Gravity, Apollo 13 feels a lot more believable from a physics point of view.
Shooting a movie in space would allow for significantly longer takes of a microgravity environment, since you'd actually be in an actual microgravity environment.
That being said, I very much doubt it's going to be cost-effective, and thus we get back to the already made "publicity stunt" argument.
