On October 17, 2021, the Soyuz MS-18 capsule landed on the steppes of Kazakhstan, returning cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy along with actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko after twelve days aboard the International Space Station. The pair had traveled to orbit to shoot scenes for 'Vyzov' ('The Challenge'), the first narrative feature film with scenes actually filmed in space, narrowly beating a competing Tom Cruise project.
Russia's space agency Roscosmos and Channel One television had raced to put a professional film crew in orbit before Hollywood could, aiming to best reported plans by Tom Cruise and NASA to shoot a movie aboard the ISS. Yulia Peresild, a well-known Russian actress, and director Klim Shipenko trained for a mere three and a half months, a fraction of the usual cosmonaut preparation time, before launching to the station on October 5, 2021.
Aboard the ISS, they filmed key scenes for 'Vyzov,' a drama about a surgeon who must travel to the space station to perform an emergency operation on an ailing cosmonaut, working around the station's real operational schedule and its actual crew.
Their return on October 17 aboard Soyuz MS-18 was itself dramatic: cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, who had swapped seats to accommodate the film crew's outbound trip, piloted the descent, and the capsule's parachute-assisted landing on the Kazakh steppe was broadcast as a triumphant capstone to the mission. The stunt underscored how spaceflight itself had become a stage for national prestige and popular entertainment nearly a decade before Cruise's own plans materialized.