With last year’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol helping to re-energise the action franchise, Paramount and **M **figurehead Tom Cruise are naturally planning for the future. According to Deadline, both want Cruise collaborator and Jack Reacher writer-director Christopher McQuarrie to tackle the fifth film.
Nothing is confirmed or official yet, so this message will be flagged under Rumour Protocol for now. But McQuarrie seems like the obvious choice for both the studio and Cruise. The producer/actor and McQuarrie have a long-standing and happy working relationship either directly on films such as Valkyrie (which McQuarrie wrote) or indirectly (he provided some uncredited script polishing on Ghost Protocol).
They’ve continued that collaboration on more recent movies, with McQuarrie helping out on All You Need Is Kill and the fledgling script for Top Gun 2, which now sits in limbo after Tony Scott’s tragic death. And if we're honest, who doesn't want to see the man who made The Way Of The Gun put Ethan Hunt through his paces?
With Paramount apparently happy with how Jack Reacher turned out, we’d expect McQuarrie's name to at least be in the mix. But first off comes the matter of hiring writers for **Mission: Impossible – Zombie Covenant **(not the official title, unless Cruise and co want to pay us £10 for it) and shoving it through development.