Tom Cruise will play a lonely robot repairman in post-apocalyptic thriller Oblivion

By Sean O'Neal | May 20, 2011 | 9:37pm

Aux Features Film

Tom Cruise’s plans to star in Guillermo Del Toro’s At The Mountains Of Madness may have fallen apart thanks to Universal’s white-knuckle grip on its purse strings, but as it turns out he and the studio will make a big sci-fi movie together—just one without Del Toro, and one whose $100 million budget is apparently totally okay because it will be PG-13. That film is Oblivion, the previously reported adaptation of a graphic novel dreamed up by Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinksi about a soldier who’s left behind on a radiation-ravaged Earth after everybody else relocates to the clouds, and who spends his days tending to the robots that patrol for and kill the aliens who have taken over the surface. Apocalypse, robots versus aliens—everything a 2011 movie project needs to get made, in other words. Plus, a requisite romance that blooms after Cruise finds a crashed spaceship with a bee-yoo-tiful lady inside it, which “forces him to question his world view.” Such as asking, “Why am I stuck down here with all the aliens when I could be boning in the clouds?” Fair question, Tom Cruise. That’s a fair question.

When we first reported on Oblivion last year it was a Disney project, owing perhaps to the fact that, as we noted even back then, it sounded like a live-action, less-sweet WALL-E. Despite this, ultimately the studio decided it wasn’t family-oriented enough. (Was it all the boning? Because we just added that in there.) Anyway, for those who are still holding out hope for Cruise working with Del Toro, take heart: Deadline also says he's rumored to be "circling" the director's Japanese monster movie Pacific Rim. Which also involves post-apocalyptic soldiers fighting aliens with robots. That might be one too many, Tom Cruise.