Tom Cruise has definitely entered the “Give me Christopher McQuarrie and Doug Liman or give me death” phase of his career, having now set up multiple projects with the two, including Jack Reacher, Edge Of Tomorrow, Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, and the upcoming covert ops actioner Mena. And since McQuarrie is already in talks to write and helm the sixth installment of the M:I franchise, Cruise figured, “what the hell,” and hired Liman to direct the sequel to Edge Of Tomorrow. (Free tagline for his career: Live. Direct. Repeat.) Being well-versed in filming the death of Tom Cruise, all Liman needed was some lines for the actor to say before he’s again murdered repeatedly: Deadline reports Race writers Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse have been brought on board to script the project.
Waterhouse and Shrapnel are in demand at present, possibly because of the latter’s proven expertise in crafting a pen name that makes him sound like a low-budget G.I. Joe knock-off from the ’80s. In addition to penning the Jesse Owens biopic, they did a rewrite on Charlize Theron’s upcoming action-thriller The Gray Man, adapted the CIA operative thriller Circle Of Treason, and wrote the script for The Aftermath, based on the novel set in post-World War II Hamburg. The Edge Of Tomorrow sequel may prove tricky, though, as the first one already killed Tom Cruise about a hundred different ways, and coming up with inventive new forms of execution will take some time. They may just want to interview victims of Scientology—we suspect those folks might have a few useful scenarios of what they’d like to do to heads of the church, Cruise included.