Twilight star Taylor Lautner is certainly the toast of Hollywood at the moment, signing up for movies left, right and centre. Now reports suggest he could become Tinsel Town’s highest paid teenager, as he may be getting $7.5 million to star opposite Tom Cruise is a film called Northern Lights.
Deadline Hollywood says that the hunk du jour is being lined up to play a young aerobatics pilot who faces off with his controlling, billionaire father and falls in love with a gifted, female pilot. Cruise will presumably play the father, with hopes of reignited some of that Top Gun vibe.
John Moore, who’s previously shown his love of planes in Behind Enemy Lines and Flight Of The Phoenix will direct (although he also made us suffer though The Omen remake and Max Payne), with filming due to begin in April.
Quite how this will fit with Lautner’s other commitments isn’t known, as he’s also signed up for an action thriller called Cancun, a remake of the 1985 movie Vision Quest and Paramount’s mega-budget Max Steel movie. Indeed its the last of those that most people are wondering about, as it was expected to go into production this summer, which may clash with Northern Lights.
$7.5 millions is a huge amount of money for someone who is essentially an untested entity at the moment. Despite the success of New Moon, that movie had a built-in audience, and so far we haven’t seen Taylor in anything else. Indeed even with New Moon there was probably more applause for his abs than his acting. However it seems Hollywood thinks they’ve got a star are are prepared to pay him accordingly.