Director Bryan Singer is rolling in rich projects right now; he’s been attached in the Hollywood rumor mill to the movies Jack the Giant Killer and a big-screen version of Battlestar Galactica, but his next project appears to be X-Men: First Class, a reboot of the Marvel mutant he launched and then abandoned to try his hand at a Superman movie.

The result, of course, was not a tuxedo-inspiring piece of cinema, but two subpar superhero flicks, as Superman Returns was disappointing, and the non-Singer X-3: The Last Stand was similarly uninspiring. Even last year’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, failed to live up to expectations.

At one time, Singer’s return to the X-franchise was doubtful, but given the weakness of films developed without his involvement, his return is now a welcomed bit of news among network execs. Word on the street is that producer Lauren Shuler-Donner has even promised to wait on moving ahead with X-Men 4 in hopes that Singer will helm that project as well.

Of course, with so many irons in the fire, can Singer really make good on all these projects? Probably not; something’s going to drop and hopefully it’s Jack the Giant Killer, a project that would be just fine in someone else’s hands.

He’s many things to many people, our Tom Cruise. A film heartthrob. A huge, bankable star. A cultural icon who changes wives every decade or so. Katie Holmes’ cradle-robbing husband. Mentally and emotionally unstable. Nutty religious fanatic. Brooke Shields’ personal nightmare.

And now, trying to win back some credibility in the eyes of a disillusioned public, a Nazi-hater, to boot. Way to shoot fish in a barrel, Tom!

Mr. Cruise’s new movie is the Bryan Singer-directed Valkyrie, which casts Cruise in the role of German national hero Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the brains behind the failed plot to kill Hitler.

What an ingenious plan! Get people to like off-his-rocker Cruise by having him hate someone absolutely no one this side of Mahmoud Ahmadinijad has expressed even the slightest sympathy for in the last 60 years or so. (Not that anyone should… thus the “shooting fish in a barrel” comment.)

A better script choice might have been for Cruise to do the Ricky-Bobby role in Will Ferrell’s recent smash hit, The Ballad of Ricky-Bobby. Having Cruise recall his Days of Thunder years in a silly comedy, hanging around with the NASCAR crowd and finding joy in auto accessories might have been just the ticket to win fans back.

Or better yet, if Cruise really wants to show the world he’s not off his rocker, have him star in an epic film about Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychiatry, that points Freud in a favorable light.

Now that would prove something.