“Time travel is really tough,” director Doug Liman says of his efforts to come up with an Edge Of Tomorrow 2 story that matches the time-loop chaos of the 2014 original.
The news cycle is certainly speeding up when it comes to an Edge Of Tomorrow sequel, and that’s a good sign that maybe, just maybe this long-gestating project might one day make it into production. There was a time when we’d have to wait months, if not years for a new nugget of information on the project and it seemed for a long while that the original movie was doomed to possess more alternative titles (it was re-christened as Live Die Repeat for its home release) than actual sequels.
Here we are in July 2024, a decade on from the original film’s release, and we’ve had two updates in the same month! The film’s director, Doug Liman, popped up at the beginning of July to reveal that he and the film’s two stars, Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, keep talking about a sequel and that he and Cruise actually rewatched the original recently for the first time in a decade.
It looks like Liman and Cruise had an ulterior motive for revisiting the film, rather than just nostalgia. The filmmaker has revealed to Collider that he is now working on the script for the sequel, although it’s proving something of a tough nut to crack:
“Time travel’s 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.”
Podcast: Edge Of Tomorrow (2014) and My Cousin Vinny (1992)
Whether this is a brand-new script, or simply a revision of the one that Blunt stated was “really, really cool” back in 2020, we don’t know. The budget for that one was also said to make it prohibitively expensive at one point in the past, but who knows if things have changed on that front?
Liman also added that now feels like the right time to persuade Warner Bros to pull the trigger on a sequel, given that the combined star power of Cruise and Blunt is certainly on a high: “I mean, 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.”
Fans of the original have been through alternating phases of excitement and disappointment before – an ongoing cycle that emulates the time loop conceit of the 2014 film in which Cruise must learn from each of his innumerable deaths to improve, with the aid of Blunt, and find a way to stop an alien invasion.
Will this cycle finally be the one that brings us an Edge Of Tomorrow 2? Momentum seems to be on the project’s side, although with Cruise’s packed slate, the earliest shoot date we’d be looking at would probably be the second half of 2026. Not quite the ‘edge of tomorrow’, more the squinty side of the distant future, but we’d take it all the same.
