As for McQuarrie, anyone who's seen his equally underrated 2000 film The Way of the Gun knows he's got a flair for colorful language and violent action few can rival. Should that be the case, we're all in to see what he brings to the role. Given McQuarrie also teased the inspiration for the project came via films like Deadpool and Joker, it seems Cruise is looking to break even badder than he did in Michael Mann's underrated 2004 thriller Collateral. The stuff we're talking about now is tinker toys, I'm actually very, very excited." The franchise has moved on, and we haven't.
In a 2020 Empire interview, Christopher McQuarrie teased that the pair were working on an action flick that would present Cruise to audiences in a way they'd never seen. "It's a very un-Tom character, and we have plans for an even more un-Tom character that we've been talking about, which I'm hopeful about in the future. The good news is that Cruise and McQuarrie are still looking to tackle such cinematic territory in Hard-R fashion. Critical drubbing aside, Never Go Back still did solid enough at the box office that many assumed a third film would soon follow. Unfortunately, many critics boasted everyone involved would've done well to follow that title's advice. ‘Jack Reacher’, the fictional brainchild of British author Lee Child and a bonafide badass, joining the long list of ex-marine vigilante arse kickers from the pens of a number of authors, has had two film adaptations to date, remarkably less than any one of the other action heroes mentioned above despite there being a wealth of literature devoted. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back arrived in 2016 with another Cruise collaborator Edward Zwick ( The Last Samurai) calling the shots.
While it didn't quite become the box office sensation many anticipated, the film was more than successful enough to merit a followup. The first Reacher film arrived in 2012 with Cruise's current Mission: Impossible bestie Christopher McQuarrie at the helm.
There's little question the Jack Reacher films rank among the most overlooked in Cruise's action oeuvre. Based on a beloved series of novels from author Lee Child, those films found Cruise stepping into the title role as a former Military Police Investigator-turned-drifter who occasionally takes up high-stakes investigatory work when the right cause arises.
Nevertheless, Cruise remains one of the biggest movie stars on the planet with the resurgent Mission: Impossible series (one of those franchises that just kept getting better) revitalizing his popularity in ways even he might not have anticipated.īut Mission: Impossible merely one of many blockbuster properties he's fronted. Tom Cruise has done pretty much everything you can do as an actor short of winning an Academy Award, though many believe the three-time nominee (for 1989's Born on the Fourth of July, 1996's Jerry Maguire, and 1999's Magnolia) probably should've taken home at least one of those too.