The Revenant Director Is Teaming Up With Tom Cruise For A Top Secret Movie
Tom Cruise may have just found his next non-"Mission: Impossible" movie, and his decision seems to mark a turning point some of us have been waiting years to see.
According to a report from Deadline, Cruise has agreed to star in a new movie from "Birdman" and "The Revenant" director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, which has Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment in negotiations to distribute and produce. Iñárritu wrote the script with Sabina Berman, as well as the writing team of Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolas Giacobone, who co-wrote 2014's "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)," but plot details are being kept under lock and key at the moment. The only thing confirmed at this time is that it will be an original story. (Apologies to anyone hoping to see what an Iñárritu-directed "Edge of Tomorrow 2" might look like.)
This will be the director's first English-language movie since "The Revenant" in 2015 (his most recent feature was 2022's Spanish-language "Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths"), and Cruise's first movie outside of the "Mission: Impossible" and "Top Gun" franchises since 2017's "American Made."
I enjoyed "The Revenant," but broadly speaking, I'm not a huge fan of Iñárritu as a storyteller. "Bardo" is more of a cinematic therapy session than a traditional narrative, and "Birdman" has some truly obnoxious moments in it, but at the same time, he's also a filmmaker with a clear vision who is able to capture glimpses of greatness. Don't forget that Leonardo DiCaprio won his only Oscar for starring in Iñárritu's "The Revenant" — could Cruise be next?
Welcome to the new Tom Cruise era
Even if Cruise does not walk away from this experience with an Oscar, it's incredibly exciting that he's made the decision to widen his aperture and start working with auteur filmmakers again after so many years working with the same very small group of directors. When Cruise signed his production deal with Warner Bros. recently, I was holding out hope that deal meant he was finally willing to stretch himself as a performer and step away from the big action tent-poles he's been making lately. Don't get me wrong: I love the "Mission: Impossible" movies, and I think guys like Christopher McQuarrie and Doug Liman have made some fantastic films. But Cruise built his superstar career by bouncing from major auteur to major auteur, and one look at his IMDb page confirms that for the past two decades, he's been fairly stagnant when it comes to working with directors who might push him to new dramatic heights (as opposed to just physical ones).
I'm hopeful that this collaboration with Iñárritu marks the beginning of a new phase of Cruise's career — one where he fully embraces working with a host of exciting new voices and showing audiences he's interested in doing more than just hanging off the side of planes. I'd love it if he continued to blow our minds with a new action movie every few years ... but I'd love it even more if he gave us some different flavors in between. He's too good of an actor to get locked in the same zone for the rest of his career.
/Film will bring you more about this project as soon as we hear it.