Tom Cruise Wants to “Return to Working With Auteurs Like Paul Thomas Anderson”

After Jeff Sneider’s reporting about Tom Cruise potentially finding a role in Quentin Tarantino’s “The Movie Critic,” Variety is confirming the scoop.

Apparently, one of the projects Warner Bros. and Cruise discussed in early January, as part of their nonexclusive “strategic partnership,” was Tarantino’s, supposed, final film. However, “The Movie Critic” is currently not set up with a distributor, and all the studios, including, and especially, Sony and Warner Bros, are currently bidding for it.

Warner has also expressed interest in Cruise doing a sequel to Doug Liman’s 2014 sci-fi film “Edge of Tomorrow.” We’re not entirely sure if Cruise is as interested, but it’s a project that’s been percolating in development for over five years now, and I bet Warner CEO David Zaslav would love for it to happen.

Meanwhile, and most intriguingly, Variety’s sources go on to state that Cruise’s current intentions are to steer away from ‘Mission: Impossible’ type of filmmaking and to reteam with auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson, whom Cruise worked with on 1999’s “Magnolia.”

Here’s Variety’s excerpt:

But Cruise wants more than action stardom — he’d like to return to working with auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson. In fact, he hasn’t earned an Oscar nomination for acting since he appeared in Anderson’s 1999 drama “Magnolia.” Earlier in his career, Cruise benefited from being directed by heavyweights like Spielberg, Scorsese and Kubrick, but then he moved into a “Mission: Impossible”-oriented phase where he routinely defies the laws of time and gravity.

If you regularly read this site then you know how much I want Cruise to go back to non-franchise acting. His last non-IP performance was in Doug Liman’s “American Made,” released in 2017.

No disrespect to ‘Mission: Impossible’ or ‘Top Gun,’ some of those films are very entertaining, but Cruise has been burying his talents as a dramatic actor for too many years, to the point where people have forgotten what a great actor he is.

Over his four-decade career, Cruise has worked with Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann, Brian De Palma, Ridley Scott, Barry Levinson, Oliver Stone, Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, Ron Howard, Neil Jordan and Jon Woo. He used to love working with these big-name auteurs, now he’s all about hanging around Christopher McQuarrie. A real shame.