The arrival of the actor Yulia Peresild, 37, and the director Klim Shipenko, 38, at the ISS seems likely to beat a Hollywood project announced last year by Tom Cruise, Nasa and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The head of the US space agency revealed last year that Cruise was in talks with Nasa about working on a film shot in outer space.
Last month, SpaceX completed the first all-civilian mission to space, taking four astronauts into a three-day orbit around the Earth.
The list of “firsts” in orbit under the Soviet space programme is legendary: first satellite, first dog, first man, first woman.