While Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One didn’t quite break the bank as predicted, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie won’t let it slow a good partnership down. The two have collaborated on a number of Cruise’s latest outings, including the last three Mission: Impossible sequels, Top Gun: Maverick and Jack Reacher. McQuarrie gained recognition with his script for The Usual Suspects, which he parlayed into his debut outing as both the writer and director of a violent, crime thriller with a side of dark comedy titled The Way of the Gun back in 2000.
McQuarrie is coming back to his harder-edged roots on a secret project with Cruise that he’s describing as a “gnarly” R-rated film. Back in 2020, McQuarrie hinted to Empire about the project and speaking once again with Empire for his in-depth talk about Dead Reckoning Part One, he confirms the project is still on its way as he and writer Erik Jendresen have written the script. McQuarrie explained, “There’s a movie that Cruise and I are talking about doing next or in some probable next, that Erik and I developed together – what has been referred to on the internet as ‘The Gnarly Movie’. It’s that movie that they’re all asking for, and that we want to do.”
In 2020, the Mission: Impossible filmmaker reflected on the first Jack Reacher when he first revealed details about the “gnarly” film as the pair first wanted to take the Jack Reacher franchise to a darker tone, “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. We were fully ready to lean into that.” Then, he goes on to tease this secret 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 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.”