Following lots of speculation and reports, Tom Cruise looks to be heading for a career shift back towards dramatic roles.
Just yesterday we covered a story that was being widely reported, suggesting that Tom Cruise was interested in securing a role in Quentin Tarantino’s The Movie Critic. That report was confirmed by multiple separate sources and was apparently one of the projects Cruise discussed when he signed a deal with Warner Bros last month.
That deal looks increasingly like it will provide Cruise with the foundation to shift his career into a new stage, focusing less on action parts and slipping back into the kind of dramatic roles that were once a key staple of his filmography.
We know now what the first step of that strategy will probably look like, following the announcement that Cruise will be starring in the next project from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
Per Deadline, Warner Bros and Legendary Entertainment are reportedly in negotiations to secure the project, which is as yet untitled and will be directed, produced and co-written by Inarritu.
Inarritu hasn’t made a film since 2015’s The Revenant which earned him a Best Director Oscar, not to mention one for Leonardo DiCaprio who scooped the prize for Best Actor. The year before that he directed Birdman, which took home the gong for Best Picture.
Working with Inarritu certainly seems like a move out of the Cruise playbook of old, where he’d align himself with critically celebrated directors such as Kubrick, Spielberg, Anderson, Mann or Scorsese trusting in their abilities so he could take creative risks.
We’ve seen a lot less of that from Cruise in the past ten years as he’s instead opted to challenge himself in other ways – usually by running down the sides of buildings or leaping from motorbikes as they plummet from mountains. For all we know, there might be a dash of that in Inarritu’s next project: as it stands, everything is under a shroud of secrecy with not even little hint of the genre, much less any story details although it is said to be an Inarritu original rather than an adapted tale.
We’ll bring you more on this one as we hear it, not to mention any other projects that spring from Cruise’s new deal with Warner Bros.
