Though the next project from Tron: Legacy director Joe Kosinski has an official release date-- July 19, 2013-- and as of March had a confirmed leading man-- that'd be Tom Cruise-- we haven't heard much about it in the last few months. That seems to be ready to change as production starts to gear up. Variety has news that not only has the movie changed names, from Oblivion to the new working title Horizons, but five actresses are heading into the office to test for the lead role opposite Cruise.
They're saying that a laundry list of "hot-right-now" actresses will be testing for the part on Saturday- The Help and The Tree of Life breakout star Jessica Chastain, Tron: Legacy's own Olivia Wilde, Another Earth and Sundance fave Brit Marling, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo herself Noomi Rapace, and former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko. As for the title switch, that's not totally out of the blue-- we wrote back in March, when the project was still at Disney, that a new writer had been hired and the title had been changed to Horizons.
The new title seems to be better suited to the film's plot, though, which finds Cruise as a lonely soldier left on the surface of the Earth after everyone else has fled to live in the clouds and stay safely away from the aliens who have taken over the planet. Based on a plot description we heard over a year ago, the plot kicks off when this soldier "meets a woman stranded in a crash and the two take an epic adventure that changes his world view." Sounds not unlike what happens in Tron: Legacy except with the genders reversed-- no wonder Wilde is in the running for the role.
Kosinski has picked a good list of five women to put opposite Cruise, a slightly starrier version of the other shortlist of actresses vying to join him in One Shot. Though Horizons feels like slightly less of a must-see given the lackluster result of Tron: Legacy, Kosinski is still a director with a ton of clout for having just one feature behind him. Here's hoping that by tackling an original story he feels very attached to, he can manage to tell a story in Horizons that matches his obvious visual skill.
