Tom Cruise Confirmed for 'Tron: Legacy' Director's Next Feature

I'll say this - as dumb a movie as "Tron: Legacy" was, director Joseph Kosinski showed a lot of potential.

He needs a lot more experience directing actors, and he has almost no ability to tell a story, but he has a very strong sense of tone, a great eye for framing, and a very good hand for editing, specifically with action sequences. The light cycle battle in particular was incredible, and I'd have been fine with two hours of just that. Alas, someone decided there needed to be "motivation" or something.

He also appears to be a very savvy businessman. Not wanting to waste a second, he came up with the idea for "Oblivion" - in which most of the Earth's population lives in cloud cities because the landscape is uninhabitable - sent it off to be published as a comic book, which was then optioned into a movie. That's filmmaking these days, ladies and gentlemen.

Disney originally bought the property, but apparently were shocked - SHOCKED! - to learn that the film was aiming for a PG-13, and Disney just isn't in that business any longer. Now Universal has it, and Deadline reported today that for once, everyone agreed that Tom Cruise was the answer they were looking for.

Cruise will play a soldier stuck alone on the planet's surface as the caretaker for robots that kill these aliens for the humans (no idea where the aliens fit into the story). He meets a woman who crashes to Earth, and "their experience together forces him to question his world view." I doubt I could even fill one hand counting the ways in which this is not "WALL-E."

I've remained a Tom Cruise fan through thick and thin, and I'm not about to give up on him now. Especially since he is one of the few actors capable of really, truly selling emotion in blockbuster films.

He might be a little bit crazy, but you'd have to be a little bit crazy to be just as committed to the emotion of "Mission: Impossible III" as "Magnolia." The result, though, makes for a much better film. And he might just make Kosinski a better director along the way.