He’s one of the biggest movie stars in the world, even after his popularity has waned in recent years, but Tom Cruise has spent most of his career eschewing the Hollywood franchise machine. Although he’s starred in five Mission: Impossible movies (including this summer’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation), he’s only ever appeared in one other sequel: The Color of Money, which was a follow-up to the classic 1961 pool shark drama The Hustler, and not an original Tom Cruise film.
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That’s finally about to change: Deadline reports that Ed Zwick is in talks to direct Tom Cruise in a sequel to Jack Reacher, the modestly successful 2012 thriller that was based on a novel by Lee Child. The original Jack Reacher, one of the better genre films in recent years, was directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, who later signed on to helm Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Ed Zwick has also worked with Tom Cruise before, on the Oscar-nominated period drama The Last Samurai.
The new Jack Reacher movie will be adapted from Never Go Back, the most recent novel in Lee Child’s series, in which Reacher (Cruise) returns to his old Virginia military base to find an old friend accused of crimes for which Reacher himself will soon be blamed.
Lots of movie stars from the 1980s and 1990s have been returning to sequelize their older, more popular hits over the last decade. But whereas Harrison Ford is venturing all the way back to the 1980s to appear in follow-ups to Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Blade Runner, Tom Cruise is opting instead to turn one of his more recent, less popular films into a series instead of capitalizing on old successes. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t interested: Cruise was actually planning to star in a sequel to 1986’s Top Gun as recently as 2011, but the unexpected death of director Tony Scott in 2012 seems to have put an end to those plans.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
