Look out Mission Impossible fans, a fifth movie is coming your way.
Deadline have confirmed today that 50-year-old A-lister Tom Cruise will reprise his role as the super-spy Ethan Hunt in a fourth sequel for Paramount and Skydance Pictures, which the Cruiser will once again also produce. No official release date has been confirmed yet, though a late 2014 or early 2015 release seems likely. Plot details are being kept under-wraps as of now as are other potential returning characters. No writer or director is being officially spoken of yet but Deadline suggest Jack Reacher's Christopher McQuarrie is favourite to land the gig, which would seem a good bet. McQuarrie also wrote Valkyrie for Cruise and Bryan Singer in 2008 and recently was being setup to scribe a decades-later Top Gun sequel for Cruise before director Tony Scott's passing. It is likely that Mission: Impossible 5 will be set straight after the events of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, with Ethan Hunt reunited with his wife, played by Michelle Monaghan. Since it was revealed at the end of the last movie that her death (which wasn't a part of MI:III but a plot device in IV) was just a ploy so that Ethan could get close to his enemy in number 4 and then ended with him going on his next mission, and given the incredible $700 million worldwide gross of the unexpected hit (Cruise's biggest ever hit)... a quick follow-up was inevitable. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol saw Cruise re-earn his movie star spurs after a string of flops by sky-walking the exterior glass of a Dubia skyscraper some 124 floors up, which when screened in IMAX, was perhaps the most Vertigo inducing film moment since Alfred Hitchcock shot Jimmy Stewart hanging off that rooftop. Jeremy Renner (at one point expected to take over the MI franchise but that failed to materialise in the final product which was as much a Cruise action vehicle as the previous flicks) and Paul Patton both were nice additions to the cast and there returns would be welcomed, as to Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, the latter who made just a brief cameo after appearing in much large roles in the previous three films.