Tom Cruise on the hunt for Horizons' female lead

Every time Tom Cruise signs on for a role, he seems to have his pick from the cream of young, female talent to play opposite him.

It wasn’t long ago that Rosamund Pike beat of competition from Hayley Atwell and Alexa Davalos to star in One Shot , and it would appear that the competition for new film Horizons (formerly Oblivion ) is even stiffer.

Showblitz reports that Jessica Chastain, Olivia Wilde, Noomi Rapace, Brit Marling and Olga Kurylenko are all set to test opposite Cruise in the coming weeks. Whether they will be going directly head-to-head remains to be seen, as there are two significant female parts in the script.

The film takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, in which humans are forced to live in clouds above an uninhabitable Earth. Cruise will play a soldier stationed on Earth in order to work on a series of drones charged with identifying and eliminating a malevolent alien threat.

One of the two female roles will be as Cruise’s military number two and off-duty lover, whilst the other will be the fiancée he was engaged to before Earth was invaded by aliens.

While we’re totally shooting in the dark here, we would guess that Wilde, Kurylenko and Rapace fit the bill for the former part, while Chastain and Marling seem better suited to the latter.

The film will be directed by Tron: Legacy ’s Joseph Kosinski, and was initially adapted from the graphic novel Oblivion . One Shot is Cruise’s next project, so we’d expect production to begin on this one early next year.

George was once GamesRadar's resident movie news person, based out of London. He understands that all men must die, but he'd rather not think about it. But now he's working at Stylist Magazine.