Christopher McQuarrie Is The Likely Director For 'Mission: Impossible 5'

Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie have developed quite a good working relationship. Before the writer/director was responsible for the script and direction of Cruise's upcoming Jack Reacher, he wrote the star vehicle Valkyrie, and after making Jack Reacher did script work on Cruise's All You Need is Kill, and on Top Gun 2 before it went on hiatus.

Now McQuarrie is reported as the likely director for Mission: Impossible 5, which is as yet without a script, but stands as a big priority for Paramount.

Deadline says that McQuarrie is "poised" to take the reins of the M:I series. Someone else will write the film, at least to get it going, but the film is one that Paramount is really interested in moving forward with, in part because the last installment was an unqualified hit for the studio.

The report says that Paramount and Skydance Productions are really happy with Jack Reacher; we've known that the studio already had a healthy dose of confidence in the movie as it pulled the opening forward from early 2013 to Christmas of this year. That's being looked at as a potential franchise (it's based on one book out of a series that features more than a dozen installments) so McQuarrie could end up involved in two big Cruise/Paramount series.

We don't know the plot of M:I 5 at this point, and it's likely that few people outside Cruise, McQuarrie, and a few other producers and execs have much of an inkling about what the film will be, and how it will balance characters played by Cruise and Jeremy Renner. The latter was introduced in Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol as a possible way to continue the franchise post-Cruise. But now that Cruise's career seems to be doing better than anyone expected it might be a few years ago, we could see him staying on as a primary in the M:I series for another installment or two.