Cruise Conjures War Magician

January 29 -- Tom Cruise always works magic at the box office, so why not actually play a magician?

Paramount Pictures has just acquired the feature-film rights to David Fisher's nonfiction book The War Magician for the superstar and put the project on the fast track, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Cruise would star as Jasper Maskelyne, the handsome, famous British stage magician who used sleight of hand in fighting the Germans during World War II.

Maskelyne one-upped David Copperfield by making the Suez Canal seem to disappear, "moving" Alexandria Harbor to hide it from Axis bombers, and creating a phantom army before the battle of El-Alamein in Egypt.

It's hoped that Cruise would be able to squeeze in the film after Minority Report, which begins shooting in April. Phantom armies and moving harbors sound like a big-scale, special-effects-driven film to us — not to mention a dialect coach for Cruise — but then, optimism is apparently running high that this and several other projects can be finished before the potential actors' and writers' strikes this spring.

A writer has not yet been hired to pen the screenplay. The film has languished in development since before Fisher's book was published in 1983, the Reporter notes.

Cruise has previously been mentioned to star in another true-life World War II story, that of American soldier Wendell Fertig.