Tom Cruise's United Artists is apparently feeling pretty good about Valkyrie. Even though the Hitler-killin' movie was getting terrible early buzz and hasn't even been released yet, the movie's screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie has already been drafted for two new projects at the studio.

McQuarrie, who also wrote the classic The Usual Suspects, will write and produce both The Monster of Florence and The Champions, projects that UA had already lined up. Variety reports that Monster will be a producing collaboration between McQuarrie, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, while The Champions has the ever-prolific Guillermo del Toro signed on as a writer and producer.

The Monster of Florence, which we wrote about back at the beginning of September in more detail, is a pretty amazing-sounding crime thriller about a real-life Italian serial killer. And The Champions is about as different from that as you can get-- an adaptation of a British TV series about a group of secret agents who are rescued from a plane crash by aliens and given superhuman powers.

McQuarrie will have his hands full with such vastly different projects, particularly for a studio on the brink like UA. But teaming up with talent like del Toro, Jinks and Cohen should only help him out, and both stories sound just bizarre enough to be completely amazing.