Tom Cruise & Christopher McQuarrie may be developing an R-Rated project

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise have enjoyed an incredibly fruitful relationship over the years, and McQuarrie's first time directing Cruise was the highly underrated JACK REACHER. When it came time to develop JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK, McQuarrie was only involved in a producing capacity as he handed over directing duties to Edward Zwick. Unfortunately, the sequel wasn't quite as successful as the first and wound up stalling the franchise after two films.

While speaking with Empire, Christopher McQuarrie revealed that Cruise and himself had hoped to develop a third film in the JACK REACHER series that would have "really fed into the brutality of [Lee Child's novels]."

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.

Although an R-Rated JACK REACHER film may not be in our future, Christopher McQuarrie teased that he's got something else with an R-Rated edge in the works with Tom Cruise. "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," McQuarrie said. "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." While one could argue that many of Tom Cruise's characters are essentially the same, when the actor does give us something out of the ordinary, the results are typically quite memorable, ala COLLATERAL or TROPIC THUNDER, so I'd definitely be down for something out of Cruise's wheelhouse.

Before Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise get up to any R-Rated shenanigans (that sounded better in my head), they're set to resume filming on MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 7 & 8, which was halted earlier this year thanks to COVID-19. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 7 is slated for a November 19, 2021 release, with MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 8 expected to follow on November 4, 2022. Tom Cruise will next be seen in TOP GUN: MAVERICK on December 23, 2020.