Tom Cruise may get a second shot at playing Jack Reacher, as Jack Reacher 2 becomes a possibility...

In the middle of January, we posted a story reporting that plans for a sequel to Jack Reacher were somewhat in the balance. The film had been relatively cheap to make by modern day blockbuster standards, with a negative cost of around $60m. Appreciating that a big Tom Cruise movie is still hardly cheap to promote, the general feeling was that somewhere around $250m at the worldwide box office was required to get Jack Reacher 2 moving.

Turns out, while nobody was looking, the film has snuck closer to that line than you might have thought.

As things stand, while Jack Reacher has struggled a little in the States, gathering up just short of $80m, it's been a decent success elsewhere. The non-US take has crept up to $133m, taking the film's total to $213m. And while that's not quite the $250m level that was said to trigger a follow-up, it's apparently enough to get Paramount and Skydance Studios to the stage where they're "figuring out the sequel".

Providing the budget is kept as tight, there's little reason - assuming Tom Cruise remains interested - that more Reacher films won't follow. Given the number of books Lee Child has penned about the character, there's no shortage of source material.