It’s been 24 years since NASCAR-based movie Days of Thunder came out, and many of the players involved are still around in the movie industry.
I was always a big fan of the Sports Illustrated issue that’d come out maybe once a year, where they’d do a “WATN” (Where Are They Now?) feature on various sports icons from throughout the years.
I figure it’d be cool to do this on occasion for this Reel Racing article series. I’ll start with Days of Thunder, because why not? We’ll focus on the main cast of characters and where they ended up after the film.
It’s also relevant, because guess where star of the movie Tom Cruise was on Sunday (Aug. 11)? Where else but helping finish off the 2024 Olympics’ closing ceremonies and pass the torch to Los Angeles for 2028.
Tony Scott (Director)
As per my Tony Scott-centric article a few weeks back, y’all know how much I adore his filmography … and Days of Thunder was only his fifth feature film of an eventual 16 movies.
Scott’s first five movies, briefly summed up, run like this:
- Vampire romance with David Bowie in old-age makeup
- Military planes going fast, piloted by Tom Cruise
- Eddie Murphy’s cop sequel
- Really depressing Kevin Costner romantic thriller
- Stock cars going fast, driven by Tom Cruise
The man had range behind the camera, what can I say?
Scott followed up Days of Thunder with The Last Boy Scout a year later, a notorious mess of a production, and then clocked back in in 1993 with True Romance — one of my favorite films ever made, hands down.
He kept the thriller theme rolling with more straightforward fare, like the excellent Crimson Tide and the underrated Robert De Niro flick The Fan, later getting more into the spy/surveillance genre around the turn of the century. After first working with Denzel Washington on Crimson Tide, Scott paired up with him for his final four films.
This began with Man on Fire in 2004 and eventually concluded with Unstoppable — for my money, one of the best and tightest action movies in recent memory — in 2010.
On Aug. 19, 2012, Scott committed suicide by jumping off of the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles. He’d reportedly been scouting locations for a Top Gun sequel days prior, and even…
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