To say that 2014's “Edge of Tomorrow” was a surprise hit may be putting it a bit lightly. The Tom Cruise sci-fi action film earned $370.5 million, and was filled with enough twists and turns to leave audiences -- to say nothing of Warner Bros. -- wanting more. The star is now set to reunite for a sequel with director Doug Liman, who has shed some light on what it might look like.

“That is the only sequel that I’m considering doing," the filmmaker told Collider, "and it’s because first of all the story is so amazing — much better than the original film, and I loved and loved the original film — and second of all, it’s a sequel that’s a prequel.”

Based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka's light novel "All You Need is Kill," the original starred Cruise as Bill Cage, a military public relations officer with no combat experience who's sent into battle against an invading alien race. Killed in combat, he finds himself in a time loop that takes him back to the day before the battle each time he dies. Cage ultimately teams up with a Special Forces operative played by Emily Blunt in hopes of discovering a way to defeat the invaders.

In the film, Liman managed to take what was effectively the same action repeated over and over, and make it into a fresh story. The director's concept of "a sequel that's a prequel" is an intriguing idea, considering the world in which "Edge of Tomorrow" unfolds. At the end of the first film Cruise’s character killed the queen of the alien Mimics, and reset the time loop, with the story ending where it began, except the alien threat was no more. Could Liman's phrasing mean we’ll be learn where the Mimics came from, or even see them in action again?

It seems as if Liman is interested in producing a sequel that’s different from any other, permitting him to explore ideas he’s had for a while.

“I’ve had some radical ideas about how to make a sequel that would interest me," he said, "in the same way that I had ideas of how you make an independent film and then 'Swingers' came along and it was like, ‘A-ha, that’s the perfect movie for me to test these ideas out on.’ I had these intellectual ideas on how you should make a sequel that are unlike how anybody else makes a sequel, and this script and this idea fit perfectly into that idea. So it’s gonna revolutionize how people make sequels. And again that’s why I try to do things like 'Invisible' that are just, the revolution’s sort of built into the idea. It’s more heresy in the film world for me to pitch things that are sort of unheard of.”

While that sounds promising, there’s still a movie to be made, and we’ll have to wait and see whether a sequel to “Edge of Tomorrow” can stand up to the original.