Since being let go by Disney and picked up by Universal, director Joseph Kosinski‘s TRON: Legacy follow up has also undergone a name change, dropping Oblivion in favor of Horizons — at least for now. One thing has remained a constant for the PG-13 sci-fi epic, and that’s the presence of Tom Cruise in the lead. He’ll play a man who lives in the clouds and heads to the Earth’s surface to repair drones that keep the planet safe from an enemy alien race.
The next item of business is signing a female lead, for which Variety has offered the following shortlist of some of the industry’s hottest young stars: Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life), Olivia Wilde (Cowboys & Aliens), Brit Marling (Another Earth), Noomi Rapace (the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace).
The film actually has two key female characters, so it’s possible Universal will try to fill both slots with names from the above field. One would play Cruise’s right-hand woman and lover who serves as his eyes and ears during his repair missions, while the other would play his fiancee on Earth before the alien invasion.
As for Wilde, you could have taken a blind poke at a theater kiosk and had a pretty good chance of seeing one of her movies over the past year. That doesn’t look to change anytime soon. She currently has five films in post-production and picked up another role this week, replacing the pregnant Jennifer Garner in the Better Living Through Chemistry.
In that film, she’ll play a trophy wife with a prescription drug dependency who begins an affair with a married man (Sam Rockwell) and plots to kill her husband. Solid premise for a noir comedy, right? Unfortunately, none of Wilde’s movies have done exceedingly well so it remains to be seen how this whole “let’s make Olivia Wilde a superstar” thing is going to work out.
Either way, it’s nice to see Cruise become a hot commodity again. He has the ’80s rock musical Rock of Ages and the crime thriller One Shot, which recently saw its competition for a female lead end with Rosamund Pike. And don’t forget this December’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol coming out before Horizons hits screens in the summer of 2013.
