The director of one of the best sci-fi movies of the past decade has given an update on its potential sequel and how he’s trying to ‘crack it’.
Filmmaker Doug Liman helmed 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow, starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, which opened to wide acclaim from critics.
Although it did acceptably well at the box office – making $378million (£294.5m) worldwide on its budget of $178m (£138m) – it was by no means a massive hit.
However, Edge of Tomorrow’s quality has built up a dedicated fanbase in the years since to make a sequel a highly attractive proposition for Warner Bros.
Liman, 59, though has emphasised that he would ‘never’ make the second movie just because of the popularity of the first – and instead needs to figure out the best way to revisit the story before he’ll be happy.
The Road House director, who has never made a sequel yet in his career and is famously cautious over the prospect, did admit that he’d be ‘crazy’ to not be trying to make Edge of Tomorrow 2 work, however.
‘Emily Blunt and Tom Cruise have never been more on top of their game than they are right now. I’d be crazy not to be trying to, you know, figure out how to make a sequel – so I am spending time trying to crack it,’ he told Collider.
Since Edge of Tomorrow was released, Cruise has had huge success with the sequel Top Gun: Maverick in 2022 as well as continuing with the enduring popular Mission: Impossible franchise.
Blunt, meanwhile, was nominated for best supporting actress at the 2024 Oscars for her turn in Oppenheimer and earlier this year appeared in another action movie with The Fall Guy, opposite Ryan Gosling.
Liman also explained that trying to work out a plotline with time travel is ‘really, really tough’.
‘All you have to do is develop a movie with time travel to come to the conclusion that humans will never travel through time because it’s hard to figure out a third act in a movie with time travel. So I know for a fact humans are never going to travel through time, but I am trying to crack it,’ he added.
The first film introduced a clever time loop concept that Cruise and Blunt’s characters Sergeant Rita Vrataski and Major William Cage battle, and was loosely based on the Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka.
It boasts a very impressive 91% Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating, as well as a 90% audience score, drawing praise for its ‘exhilarating action’ and status as ‘one of the most enjoyable American blockbusters of the previous decade’.
Fans in their reviews also describe it as an ‘underrated gem’ and as ‘one of the all-time great sci-fi movies’, claiming that it ‘needs more recognition’.
Mr & Mrs Smith filmmaker Liman acknowledged the different approach Hollywood has to a follow-up film compared to him, however, because ‘obviously the system would be like just go make [it] and it doesn’t even matter because it’s a sequel and it’ll do a billion dollars’.
He emphasised that he ‘would never do that’ – and neither would either of his stars.
‘We care way too much about, like, you know, we have too much pride in our work to ever take the easy bait,’ he insisted.
The Edge of Tomorrow sequel – which was previously revealed to have the name Live Die Repeat and Repeat, playing off the first movie’s tagline – has been a long time coming.
First teased in 2015 when co-writer Christopher McQuarrie claimed to the same publication that Cruise, with whom he collaborates on Mission: Impossible had had an idea, had had an idea and a concept was ‘locked and loaded’, Liman signed on to return as director in 2016.
Sinc then, scheduling, re-writes and other delays have plagued the in-development title, with Blunt saying in August last year that she was ‘so ready’ to return and was ‘not the impediment’ to the project.
‘I mean, I would love to make it a reality but I just don’t know when or how. And how many Mission: Impossibles does he [Cruise] need?’ she commented to Josh Horowitz on an episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast.