Tom Cruise has earned a reputation as the biggest action hero in Hollywood with his high-grossing movies like Top Gun, Mission Impossible, and more. The actor’s name is a guarantee of success for any film he signs. The megastar has been associated with several iconic movies and roles in the past decades. He has worked in several genres, however, the superhero genre seems to elude him. Over the years, his fans have wanted to see the actor in a comic book adaptation movie, but there has been no concrete news on it.
However, there was once a time when the Jack Reacher star almost decided to make his superhero genre debut with Sam Raimi’s project.
Tom Cruise was approached for Sam Raimi’s Sleeper
Tom Cruise was going to make his comic book world debut after many years with Spider-man filmmaker Sam Raimi. Reportedly, Cruise and Raimi had got together for a superhero film based on Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ comic book, Sleeper. It was announced that they had also hired a writer for the script, Brad Ingelsby. However, there was no further news on the developing project.
Co-creator of the film, Ed Brubaker later shared in an interview with MTV, that Ingelsby was no longer part of the film. He said,
“I talked to one of the producers a couple of weeks ago, and they have a new screenwriter that they hired. I don’t think they could all get on the same page. You know Hollywood, though, they usually go through a million screenwriters on one project.”
The film was announced in 2008 and it was the same year that Iron Man was released. Tom Cruise was initially primed for Iron Man’s role, but it went to Robert Downey Jr.
Also read- Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man Is Not the Only Marvel Superhero Tom Cruise Has Rejected
Why did Tom Cruise’s superhero film not see the light of the day?
Ed Brubaker’s Sleeper was a 2003–2005 series from Wildstorm Comics, and he was also the co-producer of the film. In his interview, the writer shared the reasons, which led to rewriting the film several times and ultimately getting scrapped. He said,
“If you remember in Sleeper, there’s a ‘suitcase black hole’ in the story. That was going to be part of the master plan of the bad guy in the Sleeper movie, and then Star Trek came out and it had this miniature black hole, and they’re like, ‘Now we can’t use a suitcase black hole,’ and it went back for a rewrite. I don’t understand why movies are like that. That’s like saying you can’t use World War II because Saving Private Ryan did it already.”
Thus the absence of a proper script and issues in the plot led to an indefinite delay in Tom Cruise and Sam Raimi’s film.
The plot revolves around an operative whose fusion with an alien artifact makes him invulnerable to pain. It allows him to pass the pain to others through skin contact. He is put undercover in a villainous organization by an intelligence agency, but he falls in love with a member of the group, named Miss Misery.
Source- Screen Rant
