Edward Zwick Directing Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher 2
Edward Zwick reteams with Tom Cruise to direct him in the forthcoming Jack Reacher sequel.
It appears that Edward Zwick is ready to enter the action movie fray once more after spending much time on the chessboard with this year's Pawn Sacrifice.
As first announced via Deadline, Edward Zwick has been tapped by Paramount Pictures to head up the next Tom Cruise action vehicle that does not feature Ethan Hunt. Yep, Jack Reacher is riding again, and it would appear that he is learning the hard lessons about going home.
As based on novelist Lee Child's most recent Jack Reacher novel, Never Go Back, the next Reacher film finds Jack making the mistake of going to his old military training base in Virginia to have dinner with a friend. However, by the time he gets South of D.C., she has already been arrested for a crime that she (probably) didn't commit, and Jack likewise will soon be charged with a stack of felonies. Forced to return to his ways of violence in a military setting, Jack Reacher will have to get to the root of the problem if he hopes to clear his name.
Neither working with Cruise or the subject matter are totally new territories for Zwick. The Academy Award winning filmmaker (he won for producing Shakespeare in Love), previously worked with Cruise on The Last Samurai, where he directed Cruise to a Golden Globe nomination. Zwick also directed Courage Under Fire, which similarly dealt with a military investigation following the possible murder of a female officer in the first Gulf War. Zwick also directed what we consider the best Civil War film of all time, 1989's Glory.
Cruise returns to the role of Jack Reacher after the previous 2012 franchise-progenitor grossed a solid $218.3 million worldwide. The director of that film, Christopher McQuarrie, went on to direct this summer's anticipated Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation and remains as a producer on this Jack Reacher follow-up. Additionally, Zwick and frequent collaborator Marshall Herskovitz will be rewriting the screenplay from a draft by Richard Wenk. This also marks Zwick's first action film since 2006's Blood Diamond, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio.