Now that Cruise is finished with Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, it seems he wants to keep working, and interestingly enough, he’s lining up some great looking genre films.
His next project – announced earlier this year – is Horizons, Universal’s film tie-in for the novel of the same name from Radical books.
Cruise has also apparently accepted the lead role in the All You Need is Kill adaptation, We are Mortals.
All You Need is Kill is a popular Japanese novel, which was nominated for several awards. It represents the breakthrough in the career of Hiroshi Sakurazaka, though the story is mostly derivative.
The tale is sort of a cross between Starship Troopers and Groundhog Day – neither of which are highly original themselves.
A young man named Keiji joins the United Defense Force to combat an extraterrestrial threat called the Mimics. In his very first encounter, Keiji is killed and wakes up on the morning before the battle.
Each day he tries again to survive the battle, learning and, evolving as a highly-trained soldier with each run-through, hoping that, eventually, he will be competent enough to survive.
Despite the derivative nature of the plot, it’s a story with a lot of potential, and I would expect, at a minimum, to see some great visual effects.
Of course, now that Tom Cruise has the part, the main character’s nationality will probably need to be changed, but unlike with some stories (I’m talking about Akira, right now), such an alteration would not have a big effect on the verisimilitude of the tale.
No official synopsis for the film has been released yet.
The adaptation was penned by up-and-coming Dante Harper, who is also working on a Timothy McVeigh biopic called Dreamland (which is in production), an adaptation of Asimov’s Foundation, an action adaptation of Hansel & Gretel, and Paramount’s Black Hole – which seems like a lot of projects at once for an untested writer, but I guess we’ll know how good he is pretty soon.
No production or release dates have yet been announced for We are Mortals.
