It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Tom Cruise as Mission: Impossible hero Ethan Hunt. But it could happen: just look at what happened with Jack Reacher. Cruise played the character in two films, 2012’s Jack Reacher and 2016’s underrated Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, but he’s been supplanted in window-punching popularity by Alan Ritchson in Amazon’s wildly entertaining Reacher. He’s the final evolution of Reacher: a Very Big Guy.
At 6 feet 2 inches, Ritchson is closer in height to how Reacher is depicted in Lee Child’s books (6 feet 5 inches) than Cruise (5 feet 7 inches). But Jack Reacher: Never Go Back co-writer and director Edward Zwick doesn’t blame the Top Gun star’s stature for the sequel underperforming at the box office.
“Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, which Tom Cruise and I made in 2016, fizzled at the box office,” he wrote in his memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood, according to Variety. “I blame myself (and my willing accomplice, Don Granger) for thinking the audience might enjoy a mash-up of Jack Reacher and Paper Moon, when in fact they just wanted more red meat. I had a wonderful time working with Cobie Smulders, and I certainly don’t blame Tom for not being six two — as the novelist Lee Child described his protagonist — and should Tom happen to call about making a third movie together, I’ll definitely pick up.”
Cruise has “moved on in life,” but maybe he and Ritchson can do something together. It doesn’t have to be Enter the Reacher-Verse, but I wouldn’t say no to that, either.
(Via Variety)
