Tom Cruise has only headlined one R-rated project in the last 20 years, but ‘The Gnarly Movie’ is on course to tear up the playbook

You don’t become the biggest movie star on the planet by starring in nothing but R-rated movies, and you don’t retain that status for almost 40 years by alienating the largest audience for cinema, either, but it sounds as though Tom Cruise is raring to go for his next rare foray into adult-skewing entertainment.

Since the turn of the millennium, Cruise has only appeared in six R-rated features, and he only took top billing in four of them – with his scene-stealing cameo in Tropic Thunder and supporting role in forgotten political flop Lions for Lambs the outliers – but that could be changing sooner rather than later.

Since Michael Mann’s crime classic Collateral hit theaters in 2004, the Top Gun legend has headlined just one R-rated flick, and that was 2018’s semi-biographical crime caper American Made. Mission: Impossible director, trusted collaborator, and erstwhile BFF Christopher McQuarrie is cooking up something brand new, though, and he revealed to Empire that he’s planning to make it one of his next projects.

“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. It’s that movie that they’re all asking for, and that we want to do.”

Once Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two is out of the way, then, it could be time to see Cruise get “gnarly” in a hard-hitting thriller. Unless, of course, he ends up deciding that he’d rather go to outer space first.