In 2014, Tom Cruise took a break from making moreMission: Impossiblemovies to give usEdge of Tomorrow, a heady, fast-paced sci-fi movie about time-looping alien invaders, and the one man, played by Cruise, who gets caught in the loop, and must die again and again while trying to discover a way to end the invasion. The movie became a cult hit, and fans have been clamoring for a sequel. In an interview with Collider, the director of the film, Doug Liman, revealed thatEdge of Tomorrow 2can only be greenlit by the film’s main stars, Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt.
“I’ve always been interested in the idea of a sequel being more character-driven than the first film, because that’s not how things are normally done. That’s been my approach when developing the sequel and because Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt are such phenomenal actors. I get sometimes the sequel just has to have more firepower or more explosions but no visual effect is going to top what you’re going to get from a great scene performed byTom Cruiseand Emily Blunt. It’s one of these things where if Tom, Emily and I were to say, ‘we’re ready topull the trigger on this script,’ it’s Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, the film gets made. That’s pretty much how Hollywood works. The stars are the gatekeepers. If you can get Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt to commit to the movie, it’s going to happen.”
Edge of Tomorrowwas praised not just for its action scenes, but also for its central premise ofGroundhog Dayplaced in an action setting. According to Doug Liman, he had to fight long and hard to keep the twisty nature of the story intact, since the studio wanted him to make a simple, shoot-em-up style of actioner about an alien invasion.
“[Making a sequel is] a very high bar because that was a really challenging film to go make. When you try and develop a movie with a world that involves time travel, you quickly realize that humans are never going to travel through time because there are so many paradoxes. You can hardly get through a screenplay. At some point during the development of the screenplay of the first film, Warner Bros said to me, ‘Does he need to travel through time? Maybe he could just battle aliens.’ I was like, ‘Well if you want me to make this movie, he does. I’m not interested in aliens, I’m interested in the repeating the day part.'”
Liman went on to reveal that the script for theEdge of Tomorrowsequel is still not complete. What would give the project a huge boost would be if Tom Cruise andEmily Bluntwould confirm their dates for the project. Considering that both actors have expressed a willingness to come back to the franchise, it is likely that we will be getting the long-awaited sequel at some point in the future. Let’s just hope the two leads aren’t in their seventies when that happens.Colliderbrought this news first.
