Tom Cruise And…Francis Ford Coppola??

Disc Announcements

Credit: Varety

As you may or may not know by now, United Artists is now run and operated by Tom Cruise. Yes, that Tom Cruise. He and his UA partner Paula Wagner are currently in talks to acquire the rights to Francis Ford Coppola’s first new film in close to ten years.

Coppola screened his film Youth Without Youth this past Friday for many different distributors and has had less then stellar results. There were not many takers, but Cruise still holds strong that he would like the rights to the film. Some distributors raved a bit about the film actually calling it an “arty Raiders Of The Lost Ark.”

The film stars Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs) as a seventy year old man who is struck by lightning and his life takes a quick turn. He suddenly becomes very brilliant and also starts becoming younger taking him on a quest to understand the origins of language. Alexandra Maria Lara (Doctor Zhivago – 2002) plays Roth’s love interest in the film while Bruno Ganz (The Manchurian Candidate) and Matt Damon (The Bourne Identity) also make appearances.

Youth Without Youth is centered off of the 1976 novel by relgious historian Mircea Eliade of Romania, where the film was also shot. The film is scheduled for release sometime this year.

Tom Cruise did once work with Coppola though when Cruise was cast as a relatively unknown in Coppola’s 1983 picture The Outsiders.