Back in 2020, Christopher McQuarrie opened up about his time on the Jack Reacher films with Tom Cruise, and how the two of them wished they could’ve pushed the franchise into grittier, more R-Rated territory. Those discussions led to what’s now known as The Gnarly Movie. Obviously, the two got extremely busy as the pandemic scattered the production of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One all over Europe, and naturally, delayed the filming of Part Two.
But, fear not, The Gnarly Movie is still on the menu. According to McQuarrie, the two are actively trying to film it soon. Via Empire:
“There’s a movie that Cruise and I are talking about doing next or in some probable next, that Erik [Jendresen, writer] and I developed together – what has been referred to on the internet as ‘The Gnarly Movie’,” McQ teases. “It’s that movie that they’re all asking for, and that we want to do.”
As for why The Gnarly Movie has taken hold of the internet’s imagination, here’s how McQuarrie first described the movie when he revealed its existence to the world.
“Reacher could have been an R-rated movie and an R-rated franchise and really fed into the brutality of those books. We were fully ready to lean into that,” McQuarrie told Empire about the genesis for The Gnarly Movie. “It’s a very un-Tom character, and we have plans for an even more un-Tom character that we’ve been talking about, which I’m hopeful about in the future. […] The franchise has moved on, and we haven’t. So we’ve now got stuff in the hopper. The [Jack Reacher] stuff we’re talking about now is tinker toys [compared to it], I’m actually very, very excited.”
However, before everyone gets their hopes up, Cruise and McQuarrie still have to deliver Dead Reckoning Part Two, which now has the unenviable task of topping the motorcycle-jumping action extravaganza of Part One. That’s not gonna be an easy task.
(Via Empire)