As production gears up to get back underway on Mission: Impossible 7, Christopher McQuarrie has been chatting to Empire about his other Tom Cruise action franchise, the filmmaker revealing that discussions had taken place about taking the Jack Reacher series into R-rated territory for a now-abandoned third instalment.
“Tom and I were talking about, had the series continued, to take Reacher to a place where, in the post-Deadpool, post-Joker world, Reacher could have been an R-rated movie and an R-rated franchise and really fed into the brutality of those books,” said McQuarrie. “We were fully ready to lean into that.”
Unfortunately McQuarrie and Cruise never got to realise those plans, with the rights to Jack Reacher reverting back to author Lee Child and a TV reboot subsequently greenlit by Amazon. However, it seems that director and star have been cooking up another R-rated project:
“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 [Jack Reacher] franchise has moved on, and we haven’t. So we’ve now got stuff in the hopper. The [Jack Reacher] stuff we’re talking about now is tinker toys [compared to it], I’m actually very, very excited.”
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Any R-rated collaboration would seem to be some way off at this point, with the duo set to complete the back-to-back productions on Mission: Impossible 7 and Mission: Impossible 8, while Cruise also plans to head into Outer Space (literally!) for a new sci-fi movie teaming him with director Doug Liman, NASA, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
