Randy Quaid has spoken out against the recent news that Oak Street star Anne Hathaway has been cast in the long-awaited sequel to Tony Scott’s 1990 film, Days of Thunder, alongside original star Tom Cruise. The sequel, titled Days of Thunder 2, was announced back in November 2024, with Cruise set to reprise his role as Cole Trickle and July saw reports that Jonathon Levine was in talks to direct the sports follow-up, with Will Staples penning the script.
Scott’s original film also featured Robert Duvall, Michael Rooker, Nicole Kidman and Cary Elwes and grossed $157.9 million from its budget of $60 million. Written by Robert Towne with Cruise holding additional story conception credits, it centres on a stock car driver coming under the mentorship of a veteran race car driver, later going on to develop a feud with another racer which lands him in a crash.
Hathaway was announced as joining the sequel, which Paramount Pictures has slated for a 2nd June, 2028 release, with a promotional image displaying the star and Cruise alongside a NASCAR car posted on social media.
However, Cruise’s former co-star took to an X post in which he directly tagged Cruise to share his stance that, “We need Nicole [Kidman] back.”
“You need the original girl. It’s not personal; it’s filmmaking,” the post added. “Anne isn’t sexy, because and if you haven’t noticed, she’s pregnant.”
Days of Thunder marked Cruise and Kidman’s first onscreen shared appearance, followed by 1992’s Far and Away by Ron Howard, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick, with the actors being married during the latter three films’ releases. The couple divorced in 2001.
“If I were in control of production, a real sequel worth watching for DAYS OF THUNDER would be seeing Tom and Nicole together on screen again,” Quaid’s rant went on. “We don’t need a new girl; we need a new race car!”
The post concluded with scathing branding of Hathaway as “a leftist, woke, horrible choice” for the sequel, which Quaid cites as holding a “MAGA”-only audience.
“The sexy older chick for Tom in this film needs to be Nicole. That’s the casting that would sell the idea. 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,” the actor also wrote. “This is a weird thing, like they want it to come out and tank.”
Hathaway has been an ongoing credit in 2026 film, with recent performances in David Lowrey’s Mother Mary, David Frankel’sThe Devil Wears Prada 2, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street. The star is set to close out the year with a central role in Michael Showalter’s Verity, based on the Colleen Hoover novel of the same title, and later appear in The Princess Diaries 3.
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