It’s been 10 years since Christopher McQuarrie brought us his excellent directorial debut, The Way of the Gun. And now, according to the Heat Vision blog, it looks like he might pick up the megaphone again for Paramount’s thriller **One Shot{
For now, however, he’s definitely re-writing the movie, which will be adapted from Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. The ninth one, to be exact, which finds a military sniper who is fighting a murder charge and asks Reacher, himself a heck of a sniper and the world's hardest man, for help.
Given that Cruise/Wagner Productions originally optioned the books, it’s not a shocker that someone who has collaborated with Cruise in the past is now attached to work on it (since Reacher's 6'5", however, don't expect Cruise to go playing the role). Josh Olson wrote a draft of the movie, and now McQuarrie is re-writing with an eye to make it his next directing job.
He'll be hoping it works out, as he’s been trying to get back in the director’s chair for years now. His last attempt, a version of The Stanford Prison Experimen****t with Paul Dano and Jesse Eisenberg in the cast, saw its funding vanish before he could begin shooting.
And more recently, McQuarrie has been spending his time on writing jobs, penning the sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the Bryan Singer/Tom Cruise project Valkyrie.
While we're hugely excited on one level about a Jack Reacher novel, two things are halting our jump for joy just at this moment: the rights to Lee Child's novels are scattered around a handful of different producers and studios, therefore meaning that - unless someone gets very serious about combining all the rights - there'll never be a definitive Jack Reacher series.
And, more pertinently, who the hell can play Reacher? We've been going back and forth about this in the Empire office for ages, and still not come up with a definitive answer. Over to you!