Although he’s sort of been attached for months, Tom Cruise has now officially signed to star in Joseph Kosinski’s sci-fi project Oblivion. The reason it’s taken a while to get him on-board is that while Disney was originally backing the movie, they decided against it, and it needed to find a new home. That’s now been sorted, with Universal funding the flick, meaning Tom can ink his deal.
The $100 million film takes place in an apocalyptic future where most of the population lives in clouds above an earth surface that has been rendered uninhabitable. Cruise will play a soldier who’s stuck alone on the planet, repairing the drones that patrol and destroy a savage alien life form. He encounters a beautiful woman who crashes in a craft, and their experience together forces him to question his world view. The movie will be rated PG-13, with Disney ditching it as they only wanted it if it could be pulled down to a PG rating.
Hopefully this will all go ahead, as Cruise was attached to Guillermo Del Toro’s At The Mountains Of Madness at Universal earlier this year, but that fell apart over the budget, as well as worries about the R-rating. Universal seems pretty committed to Oblivion, so hopefully they won’t get cold feet.
Deadline says Cruise will shoot Oblivion once he finishes work on Rock Of Ages, although there’s no exact filming start mentioned.