Last month we reported that Tom Cruise was in talks to star in the movie ‘We Are Mortals’, a film based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s manga, ‘All You Need is Kill.’ After months of little to no progress on the movie, it looks like it will start moving full steam ahead as Cruise has verbally agreed to take the lead.

According to Variety, although an official deal has yet to be signed negotiations should begin soon. All that means is that Warner Bros. and Cruise just have to agree on a price for him to do the movie. Once that is done, production on the film can move forward.

It was said that Warner Bros. president Jeff Rovinov wanted a big star for the film and originally had Brad Pitt in mind. Although the original script called for a younger actor (like Ryan Gosling or Joseph Gordon Levitt), the script was rewritten to make the character fit Cruise’s age. What may have clenched the deal were the talks that director Doug Liman had with Cruise once he heard Cruise liked the script. Liman went so far as to even travel  to Pittsburg where Cruise was filming at the time to discuss the film with him.

This will be the second of two sci-fi films Cruise will be filming back to back. He will begin filming ‘Oblivion’ in March then start on ‘We Are Mortals’ sometime later in the year. The fact that Cruise will be starring in two science fiction movies so close together has some studio execs concerned, but Liman has insisted that although the movies are in the same genre, they are completely different.

In ‘We Are Mortals’, Cruise plays a soldier in a war against aliens who finds himself reliving his last day over and over again after being killed. Eventually, through his repetitive training and battle experiences from these time loops, he becomes a better warrior which may be the key to ultimately altering his outcome.

And in ‘Oblivion’, Cruise plays a soldier who repairs drones that patrol and destroy remnants of alien life still on the planet. The arrival of an unexpected traveler causes him to question what he knows about the planet, his mission, and himself.

It will be interesting to see how both films will eventually turn out in the theaters. Both have a release date in 2013, according to IMDB, so depending on how long post production takes they may not be released too close together.  So which movie would you go see?