Tom Cruise is in early talks to star in Joseph Kosinski's next science-fiction film, Oblivion .
It's looking like Universal will be the studio to finance and distribute the hot property, though apparently that's dependent on Kosinski keeping the budget around $100 million.
Oblivion is based on a graphic novel (which in turn was based on an idea by Kosinski), and it got a great deal of interest from studios after Disney let the TRON: Legacy director shop it around.
The post-apocalyptic story sees Earth pretty much uninhabitable, with the majority of the population living in the clouds.
Cruise would play a soldier who services anti-alien droids on Earth, though the film is primarily a love story as it focuses on his relationship with a woman who crash-lands on the near-empty planet.
Promisingly, the script comes from The Departed Oscar-winner William Monahan, and it's currently getting a polish by Karl Gajdusek.
Next up for Cruise (who has wrapped on Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol ) is musical Rock of Ages , then he's got a void in his schedule created by the collapse of Guillermo del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness .
