Well, that didn’t take too long, did it? Mere weeks after being mentioned as in talks for Joseph Kosinski’s long-gestating sci-fi pic Oblivion, Tom Cruise is now officially aboard to star, with the Tron Legacy director aiming to kick off shooting in October.

Oblivion, as you may recall, is a script that Kosinski has been trying to get made even before he landed the Tron gig. It concerns a post-apocalyptic Earth, which has been left near uninhabitable. While the vast majority of the population live in cities floating above it, a few unlucky souls must head down to the scorched planet to repair the patrol drones that keep aliens at bay. When a soldier tasked with the job finds a woman in a crashed space pod, their adventure leads to both of them learning something new about the state of the world.

Kosinski set the project up as a graphic novel when he had no joy getting the script developed. Then Disney jumped aboard after Tron Legacy, only to decide that the bleak tale didn’t fit with their family friendly franchise remit. Universal swooped in to grab the rights and, with Cruise now attached, have granted it a $100 million budget and the freedom to aim to for a PG-13 rating.

Cruise, meanwhile, has just kicked off work on Adam Shankman’s musical adaptation Rock of Ages, where he’s playing an OTT rocker. He’s pencilling in Oblivion to follow that.

But more intriguingly, Deadline reports that Cruise is also talking to Guillermo del Toro about a possible role in his giant creature movie Pacific Rim. There’s no word on whether he’ll actually end up in the cast, but it’s nice to see their partnership – even though it couldn’t get At the Mountains of Madness made – remaining on good terms.