It wasn’t quite a foregone conclusion but Tom Cruise and Paramount have ploughed ahead with development on a sequel to 2012’s **Jack Reacher. It’s now looking like Cruise’s frequent collaborator (and Reacher/Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation director) Christopher McQuarrie won’t be back for the new film, with Deadline reporting that Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz are in talks to sign on behind the camera instead.
If the deal is hammered out, it would reunite Cruise with the creative team behind The Last Samurai, with Zwick taking the director’s chair and working on the script with Herskovitz. Given McQuarrie’s busy schedule on Rogue Nation (which is now set to arrive in cinemas on July 30), he hasn’t had the necessary time to devote to Reacher, and Paramount had Equalizer writer Richard Wenk working on a script, which the new duo will rewrite. McQuarrie isn't going to be completely hands-free, however: he'll be executive producer.
Back when the sequel was reported, it looked like the new film would adapt 2013's Never Go Back, the eighteenth Reacher novel. The plot – assuming the book is still the final choice when the sequel goes into production - finds Reacher heading back to his old military base in Virginia to dine with the woman who is now the commanding officer. By the time he gets there, she has been arrested, Reacher finds himself being charged with beating someone up and learns that he may have fathered a child. He can’t remember either transgression but must get to the bottom of it with his trademark insight and generous dollops of brute force.
Cruise is on board to produce and star, but we’ll have to wait and see how the rest of the Reacher sequel truly takes shape.