Cruise not Iron Man. So far. As of yet.

It’s being widely reported that the possibility of Tom Cruise playing Iron Man has finally been laid to rest. I don’t want to rock the boat (heh), but there were a couple of items that jumped out at me. One (towards the middle) was disconcerting, and the other (at the very end) extremely interesting, and it doesn’t seem that anyone has picked up on it:

Cruise: “It’s not happening. Not with me, no.”

Press: Why?

Cruise: “I don’t know. It just…they came to me at a certain point and…when I do something, I wanna do it right. If I commit to something, it has to be done in a way that I know it’s gonna be something special. And as it was lining up, it just didn’t feel to me like it was gonna work. I need to be able to make decisions and make the film as great as it can be, and it just didn’t go down that road that way. … I’ve never just made a movie to make a movie. I’ve always made it because I was really interested in the story. I wanted to make that kind of picture and see what it would take. And it was an adventure for me. And for that it just wasn’t panning out, so far. As of yet.“ [emphasis added]

I am of the opinion that Cruise’s recent work has been of a very high quality (even if not consistently critically well-received), and if he decided to stay away from the Iron Man project because he didn’t think it would work, that’s a red flag concerning this film.

However…

What did he mean by “And for that it just wasn’t panning out, so far. As of yet.“? Was this just typical Hollywood maneuvering in order to keep the door open? Or does it mean that he voiced his concerns to the production team and that they might be working on changes that would bring him back in? The other thing that makes Iron Man unlikely is that as far as I know Tom Cruise is still committed to the upcoming Michael Mann WWII film…

This is all of course, pure speculation, but man, that final little quote is just chewing on the back of my mind.

Thanks to Dark Horizons for the heads up.