UPDATED: Tom Cruise is novelist Lee Child’s tough guy Jack Reacher?

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

UPDATE: Deadline now confirms that Cruise is a “lock” to play Jack Reacher, and that filming will start in the Fall before the actor makes Joe Kosinski’s futuristic OBLIVION.

June 13, 2011: Has Tom Cruise found another franchise to supplement his impossible missions?

According to Deadline, the actor is thinking about taking ONE SHOT, based on one of writer Lee Child’s long-running, best-selling thriller books about roving ex-Army cop Jack Reacher. The Paramount movie will be written and directed by THE USUAL SUSPECTS scribe Christopher McQuarrie (who also wrote Cruise’s VALKYRIE, and reportedly some of M:I GHOST PROTOCOL).

This isn’t Cruise’s first flirtation with big Jack — a few years ago he was planning to produce an adaptation of the same book, which writer Josh Olson (A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE) was then adapting.

The book finds the tight-lipped, hard-hitting hero investigating a former Gulf War sniper accused of killing several seemingly random civilians, and Reacher must then decipher a puzzle that involves the Russian Mafia.

What about the fact that Cruise is about three feet shorter than the character as written? The author himself apparently doesn’t see it as an issue: “Reacher’s size in the books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force, which Cruise portrays in his own way.”

Assuming he commits, Cruise would make the movie some time after OBLIVION, the futuristic project from TRON LEGACY director Joe Kosinski.