According to The Hollywood Reporter it would appear that Tom Cruise is once again one of the most in demand actors in Hollywood. Having just wrapped Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol for Paramount, currently filming Rock of Ages for Warner Brothers, and having just agreed to star in Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, Paramount has now just handed him an offer to play the lead role in Christopher McQuarrie’s (writer of The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie) film One Shot. Based off the Lee Child’s scribed series of novels, Cruise would play bad ass drifter Jack Reacher.

Here’s a synopsis of the novel:

Child’s new novel begins when a sniper methodically kills five office workers with six quick shots and then disappears. But in a Child thriller the expectations aroused by one page are sure to be dashed on the next; unravelling and re-tangling violent narratives is the writer’s specialty. This is the ninth of his books to feature the drifter-investigator Jack Reacher—a hybrid of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer—and it certainly ranks in the first tier of the series. There is considerable mayhem, lovingly described (“A long time ago the bones in his spine had been methodically cracked with an engineer’s ball-peen hammer”), and there’s a good cast, including suspicious law-enforcement personnel and an elderly Russian who is missing most of his fingers. Before it’s all, vividly, over, one feels confident that Reacher—smart, rootless, and brave—will not only get his man but make him suffer.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Having never read the book I can’t specifically comment on the quality of it, but I have a feeling Cruise would fit this role to a tee (yes I know Reacher is supposed to be 6’5, but really, who cares?).

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