After making a strong return to the director's chair with 2012's well-received Jack Reacher, Chris McQuarrie opted not to take the helm of its 2016 sequel Jack Reacher: Never Go Back as he took a little break before beginning prep on Mission: Impossible - Fallout.
Unfortunately, the Edward Zwick-directed Jack Reacher sequel didn't quite reach the thrilling heights of its predecessor, ultimately resulting in the film franchise being rebooted and retooled for the small screen as Amazon Prime Video acquired the rights and promptly ordered it to series, set to stream sometime in either 2021 or 2022.
Despite all that, it looks like Cruise and McQuarrie, in the wake of Never Go Back's underwhelming box office return, did still have significant discussions about a potential third film that would've course-corrected and taken the franchise in a considerably different direction while seriously upping the badass factor. He tells Empire,
“Tom and I were talking about, had the series continued, to take Reacher to a place where, in the post-Deadpool, post-Joker world, Reacher could have been an R-rated movie and an R-rated franchise and really fed into the brutality of those books. We were fully ready to lean into that.”
However, while that project might be dead, it sounds like he and Cruise may be cooking up something even better in the lab that he claims would let us see Cruise in a light unlike any we've seen him in before. And, yes, it would be an R-rated project.
“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.”
Before they can get to that, the dynamic filmmaking duo are currently hard at work - or well, waiting on getting back to work - on Paramount's two-part Mission: Impossible 7 and Mission: Impossible 8, which are due out in theaters November 19, 2021, and November 4, 2022, respectively. Cruise's slate also has an untitled actioner scheduled that he plans on shooting in space with SpaceX and director Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow). A sequel to Edge of Tomorrow has also been rumored to be in the cards, but nothing on that front is official just yet.