And guess what? That movie is being made. According to reports, Charlize Theron and Tom Cruise are set to team up for an adaptation of French movie The Tourist, with a script written by Oscar-winning writer Julian Fellowes.

Without knowing too much about The Tourist, it’s safe to say that Tom Cruise is still after that Oscar. It seems clear to us that Tom is only making the movie to glean Oscar-winning tips from Fellowes and Theron, and then put them to use in his next movie – which we’re expecting to be about a dirty-faced, slightly disfigured woman played by Tom Cruise who talks in lots of half sentences over himself all the time.

If we were Tom Cruise – which we assume we’re not because we aren’t rich and we don’t need a stepladder to kiss normal-sized girls on the cheek – then we’d be signing up for movies all over the shop at the moment.

Tom’s Nazi movie Valkyrie could go one way or the other – its release date has been ominously shuffled about all over the place, but its trailer does look pretty spiffy – and if it does end up doing a Lions For Lambs, Tom will need to have as many other movies on the go as possible. That way he can still have a career as an actor instead of committing himself fully to being a silly little lunatic who believes in aliens.

And, to his credit, that seems to be what Tom Cruise is doing. He’s already lined up his next film, and the omens look good. It’s The Tourist, a movie about a normal member of the public who’s coerced by a spy to help flush out oh for God’s sake it’s The Man With One Red Shoe isn’t it? Nice one Tom Cruise. What next? A high-remake of The Burbs?

Anyway, let’s not lose hope entirely, because The Tourist sounds like a very highbrow remake of The Man With One Red Shoe, as Tom Cruise’s co-star will be Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron and they’ll be working from a script by Oscar-winning writer Julian Fellowes. Ropeofsilicon reports:

The Tourist, the Bharat Nalluri-directed remake of the 2005 French thriller Anthony Zimmer, is shaping up nicely as Charlize Theron is now in negotiations to join the cast. The flick will feature Theron as a female Interpol agent who uses an American tourist in an attempt to flush out an elusive criminal with whom she once had an affair. Obviously, Cruise is the tourist.

OK, so The Tourist is a thriller. That doesn’t help much. What we need to know is if this is a flashy blockbuster-style thriller, or if it’s a gritty indie-style thriller. Knowing that would really help, because we’ve got a formula to tell whether it’ll be any good or not. For instance:

LOW BUDGET INDIE:

Charlize Theron will disappear into her role, taking on a brave physical transformation for the sake of visceral realism.

Tom Cruise will try to disappear into his role, but still end up looking and acting like Tom Cruise.

BIG BUDGET BLOCKBUSTER

Charlize Theron’s character will be 85% shiny hair to 15% tits and it’ll be revealed that she and Tom Cruise have been lovers throughout history five minutes from the end even though that makes zero sense to any of the rest of the film.

Tom Cruise will spend the entire movie running as fast as he can while pulling a face that makes him look like he’s straining for a poo.

We only hope the producers have taken these calculations into consideration.

But apparently she of the lips fame does have time – not only time, but she also has the inclination to take roles that were initially meant for one Tom Cruise. Not content with stealing all the babies from the birthplace of humanity, it would seem that Angelina Jolie also wants to steal roles from Scientologists.

At least, that’s what it looks like on current evidence.

The long-touted but never actually made Edwin A. Salt is reportedly the film that Jolie will be taking the lead role in, with the title receiving a change as we would all expect. Edwina A. Salt doesn’t sound that good, mind, so hopefully they’ll put more thought into it than we have.

Not only will the title change, but the script itself is being redrafted to accommodate Angelina and her style. Which probably just means there will be more in the way of revealing thigh/cleavage shots than was originally intended – not many more though, as we’re sure the Cruiser wanted to show his rack off just as much as Jolie, but more nonetheless.

There may also be some re-writing for other reasons that we can’t even guess at, but the general story is likely to remain the same: CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy, has to elude capture long enough to establish his/her innocence. Sounds… formulaic. Oh well.

It does seem that Angie keeps on getting everything handed to her these days – from the $14 million for pictures of her tiny fleshbags, through the obviously necessary help and advice of everyone’s favourite knobend Bono and onto the fact that she’ll probably end up getting handed the Catwoman role, should the part ever get cast – the girl seemingly gets everything handed to her on a particularly sexy platter. Now put Tom Cruise’s job on that list.

The poor tiny man – his wife’s gone and done a runner, for a bit at least, he’s all alone and now he doesn’t even get to be a spy in a film he was supposed to be in for ages. It’s probably affected his thetan levels too, bless his little face. But hecklerspray can’t see Tom Cruise doing anything but a great big smile when he finally gets to show the world how great he is as a one-eyed Nazi.

As for Angelina Jolie, well – she would seem content with popping out sprogs, stealing sprogs from other countries, getting it on with Brad Pitt, forcing our stand-in editor to go on Sky News and talk about them in a thoroughly stupid, ill-informed and embarrassing fashion and taking roles off of possibly mental Scientologists.

Oh, and let’s not forget she’s taking part in an adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, too. But we’re not really qualified to comment on that one in our usual hilarious fashion, as the book is really big and full of words that we can’t be bothered trying to understand. Bloody Objectivism.