Barely 24 hours since a trade article revealed Tom Cruise’s intended desire to work with auteurs and reunite with the likes of cineastes like Paul Thomas Anderson, the 61-year-old actor has linked up with a five-time Oscar winner. Deadline reveals that Cruise will star in the next film from “Birdman” and “Bardo” filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu through his non-exclusive strategic partnership at Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment are in negotiations for the untitled film, but not much else is known other than it’s another original Iñárritu film “meant to be seen on the biggest screens across the world” and his first English-language movie since 2015’s “The Revenant” starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
The mystery film was written by Iñárritu in 2023 with Sabina Berman as well as Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolas Giacobone, his co-writers on “Birdman,” making for a reunion there ten years later.
What is known is that the Oscar-winning director was recently having meetings with different A-list actors to discuss the project, with Cruise being one of the first and apparently jumping on the project as soon as he could.
Just yesterday, a lengthy Variety article had details on a meeting Cruise had with Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy. During the meeting, Cruise apparently spoke about a host of possible projects he was interested in, one of them being Quentin Tarantino’s final film, “The Movie Critic,” another being an “Edge Of Tomorrow” sequel, and then a broader desire to return to working with top shelf filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson whom he worked with on 1999’s “Magnolia,” the movie that gave him his last Oscar nomination.
At 61, while Cruise is still a big action star, it’s a canny move of the actor to start looking at the next chapter of his career and perhaps go in a Paul Newman vein with as many greats he can team up with. Evidently, Iñárritu will be the first, but don’t be surprised if a name like Paul Thomas Anderson pops up in the future, as they’ve both now expressed the desire to work with one another again. Who could be next, Michael Mann, again? Kathryn Bigelow? Time will tell.
The two don’t seem like a natural pair on the surface, but sometimes alpha dogs attract alpha dogs. As it stands, the prospect of Cruise and Iñárritu together is exciting, and we’re dying to know details about what genre it might fall into. But honestly, we’d love to see an old-school adult drama since Cruise hasn’t tackled that in ages.
