Edge of Tomorrow 2 Will Happen Once Tom Cruise & Emily Blunt Both Commit to the Script

In 2014, Tom Cruise took a break from making more Mission: Impossible movies to give us Edge of Tomorrow, a heady, fast-paced sci-fi movie about time-looping alien invaders, and the one man, played by Cruise, who gets caught in the loop, and must die again and again while trying to discover a way to end the invasion. The movie became a cult hit, and fans have been clamoring for a sequel. In an interview with Collider, the director of the film, Doug Liman, revealed that Edge of Tomorrow 2 can only be greenlit by the film's main stars, Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt.

"I've always been interested in the idea of a sequel being more character-driven than the first film, because that's not how things are normally done. That's been my approach when developing the sequel and because Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt are such phenomenal actors. I get sometimes the sequel just has to have more firepower or more explosions but no visual effect is going to top what you're going to get from a great scene performed by Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. It's one of these things where if Tom, Emily and I were to say, 'we're ready to pull the trigger on this script,' it's Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, the film gets made. That's pretty much how Hollywood works. The stars are the gatekeepers. If you can get Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt to commit to the movie, it's going to happen."

Edge of Tomorrow was praised not just for its action scenes, but also for its central premise of Groundhog Day placed in an action setting. According to Doug Liman, he had to fight long and hard to keep the twisty nature of the story intact, since the studio wanted him to make a simple, shoot-em-up style of actioner about an alien invasion.

"[Making a sequel is] a very high bar because that was a really challenging film to go make. When you try and develop a movie with a world that involves time travel, you quickly realize that humans are never going to travel through time because there are so many paradoxes. You can hardly get through a screenplay. At some point during the development of the screenplay of the first film, Warner Bros said to me, 'Does he need to travel through time? Maybe he could just battle aliens.' I was like, 'Well if you want me to make this movie, he does. I'm not interested in aliens, I'm interested in the repeating the day part.'"