Christopher McQuarrie Planning R-Rated Movie With Tom Cruise Playing A Character You Wouldn't Expect

Tom Cruise has been enjoying working with Christopher McQuarrie for over a decade now. They first collaborated with Valkyrie back in 2008, have found great success with the Jack Reacher and Mission: Impossible franchises, not to mention Edge of Tomorrow (aka Live Die Repeat). Oh, and there's The Mummy too. With production on the back-to-back Mission: Impossible sequels possibly resuming overseas in September, Cruise and McQuarrie will be busy together for the next few years. But their next collaboration will bring something much different.

Christopher McQuarrie recently revealed that he's developing some kind of R-rated movie that would have Tom Cruise playing a character that you wouldn't expect the global superstar to tackle. Find out more below.

Speaking with Empire, McQuarrie vaguely teased their hopes to continue Jack Reacher by veering into darker territory, inspired by the recent wave of success of big R-rated movies. The filmmaker said:

"Tom and I were talking about, had the series continued, to take ['Jack Reacher'] to a place where, in the post-'Deadpool', post-'Joker' world, it could have been an R-rated movie and an R-rated franchise and really fed into the brutality of those books."

Frankly, I'm not sure why McQuarrie is referencing Deadpool and Joker as the movies that made them feel like they could take Jack Reacher in a more hardcore direction and still find box office success. Sure, Jack Reacher is an established intellectual property with plenty of books featuring the character, but Deadpool and Joker have even bigger fanbases. Plus, I would think John Wick would be more representative of what you'd want from a Jack Reacher movie, albeit with less sleek style, but maybe that's just me.

But their ideas for Jack Reacher don't really matter, because the movie franchise is done, and the character is heading to Amazon Prime in the form of a TV series. However, McQuarrie says that hasn't stopped them from following through on their ambitions for an R-rated movie franchise starring Tom Cruise. But it would have Cruise playing a character you wouldn't expect him to play. McQuarrie said:

"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."

We're not sure if that means there are two projects that McQuarrie hopes to have Cruise in, or if he's referring to Jack Reacher as a character that is "very un-Tom" and this new project veers even further away from what you'd expect. Clearly this is something very early in development, and since Mission: Impossible 7 and Mission: Impossible 8 won't arrive in theaters until November 19, 2021 and November 4, 2022 respectively, we'll be waiting awhile before they're really able to dig into this project. But for now, color me intrigued.