Will Tom Cruise return to more serious dramatic movies under Warner Bros. deal?

Just last month, Tom Cruise entered a partnership with Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy to develop and produce original and franchise theatrical films, but what kind of movies does Cruise really want to make? By risking life and limb with real stunts in movies such as Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise has become the biggest action star on the planet. While the actor will doubtlessly continue in the action realm, a report from Variety states that Cruise would like to return to the early days when he worked on serious, dramatic movies with directors such as Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, and Paul Thomas Anderson.

In the early days of his stardom, Cruise was a bonafide awards contender, scoring Best Actor nominations at the Academy Awards for Born on the Fourth of July and Jerry Maguire, but it’s been twenty-five years since his last Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Magnolia. Under this new Warner Bros. partnership, De Luca and Abdy hope to pair Cruise up with an auteur director who “marries box office performance and awards-season heat.” There have been rumblings that Cruise might appear in Quentin Tarantino’s The Movie Critic, but that won’t necessarily land at Warner Bros. as Sony Pictures is also in the running to distribute the director’s tenth and final movie.

“The strategy at Warner Bros. right now and the reason they made some of these big star deals is they’re basically playing with other people’s money,” one insider told Variety. “They’re shopping for Quentin or Cruise with the notion they can use it as a shiny object that is going to be additive when Zaslav sells the company.“

Although Tom Cruise is still in great shape and has a few more death-defying stunts in his future, it makes sense for him to start setting up the next stage of his career when he might not be able to dangle off the edge of a cliff or cling to the side of a cargo plane. With decades of experience under his belt, it’s exciting to think of an older Cruise giving us more movies like The Color of Money, Rain Man, A Few Good Men, Eyes Wide Shut, or Magnolia.