Christopher McQuarrie Explains The “Tough Decision” Of Killing A Key Character in ‘Dead Reckoning’

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When did the “Mission: Impossible” films become action movies? I’m not sure when that happened, but I do know this much: For a series like the one in question, it’s live by the action, die by the action. For a few days there, people were chattering about all the great action in “Dead Reckoning Part One,” talking up the Fiat car chase or that train-dangling-from-a-cliff climax as if we’d never seen a sequence like that one before.

“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” didn’t fare as well commercially as Paramount expected, taking in $452 million in its theatrical run so far. And most of that comes from overseas, particularly China, where the film is a big hit.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” director Christopher McQuarrie revealed before the film opened in theaters that he rejected de-aging Tom Cruise for a 1989-set opening scene. Now on a new episode of “The Empire Spoiler Special Film Podcast” (via /Film), the filmmaker dropped that he considered reaching out to Julia Roberts to de-age her as well for the scene that never happened as planned.

The adage of Hollywood and or pundits who closely follow Hollywood, writers, armchair analysts, etc., is that you should always have a plan and never just “make it up as you go.” Filmmaking is such a massive endeavor and a massively expensive endeavor, a plan to execute all the ambitious things you want to do is critical, and it’s why some big films feature massive and extensive pre-production periods: precisely to map out and work out how to pull all that stuff on in advance so on the day of shooting, no one is wasting money.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” now playing in theaters. “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’s” jaw-dropping train sequence in the film’s third act features Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt fighting Esai Morales’ Gabriel on the roof of a locomotive as it hurtles down a track at 60 mph. The set piece was originally supposed to be much longer. The scene climaxes with the train plunging off a bridge one carriage at a time during which Ethan and Grace (Hayley Atwell) cling on for dear life as they climb back up through the train.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Tom Cruise has become a regular visitor to South Korea and, while his latest visit was more than a week ago, the impact of his efforts appeared to endure. His ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning’ got off to the second strongest start at the Korean box office of any Hollywood movie released this year. The film grossed $9.75 million between Friday and Sunday, according to Kobis, the tracking service operated by the Korean Film Council (Kofic). That represented a 60% market share, earned from some 2,400 screens. In its full opening five days (plus previews), it earned $14.2 million.

SATURDAY PM UPDATE: Facts are facts, and Paramount/Skydance’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One set a 5-day opening domestic record for the franchise with $80M, we hear.

Todd Gilchrist editor Since “Mission: Impossible III” in 2006, Simon Pegg has been part of the core ensemble of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, playing hacker and sometime field agent Benji Dunn opposite its stalwart star Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt. Pegg was never going to be the actor risking life and limb on screen — “it’s Benji’s job to be the one that actually says, ‘what the fuck are we doing here?’,” he observes. But over five installments of the indefatigable series, his character has shifted from questioning what Ethan is doing in the moment to believing absolutely in why he’s doing it, thanks in no small part to the writing and directing of Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie came onto “Ghost Protocol” as “a sort of master plumber to re-wriggle the pipes,” as Pegg characterizes it, and since became the series’ ongoing co-architect with Cruise. Their partnership reaches its peak, even if by all indications it’s far from over, with “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” half of an operatic culmination of narrative seeds planted since Cruise first played Hunt back in 1996. In a conversation with Variety, Pegg discusses what makes McQuarrie’s creativity so special, and his collaboration with Cruise et al so unique; he also talks about new details he discovered about Benji, explored the challenges of being self-referential in a franchise like this without undermining emotional stakes, and hinted at what is yet to come as he and the rest of the filmmaking team move on to “Dead Reckoning — Part Two.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses the ending of “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” currently playing in theaters. “Dead Reckoning,” the seventh installment of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, is the latest Hollywood blockbuster to be split into two movies, but Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie tried their hardest to give “Part One” a non-cliffhanger conclusion. The filmmaker recently told Total Film magazine that thinking about how to conclude the first of two movies kept Cruise up at night during the filming of “Part One.” “Where we ended the movie was always where we were going to end it,” McQuarrie said of the train action sequence. “How we ended the movie was a big, big mystery for us. It kept Tom awake at night throughout production. He would come in all the time and say, ‘This can’t be a cliffhanger, it’s got to be satisfying.’ The audience has to feel a sense of completion.”

Something that’s brought up in a new Happy Sad Confused podcast with “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning—Part One” star Hayley Atwell. The host of the podcast, Josh Horowitz, essentially says ‘Mission Impossible’ movies should not work.

Paramount/Skydance’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is off and running overseas with a $39.8M cume through Thursday in 48 international box office markets. This includes Wednesday openings in some markets and a strong paid preview program. With domestic’s Wednesday/Thursday plus previews, that brings the global total on the Tom Cruise-starrer to $$63.6M through yesterday.

Brent Lang Executive Editor “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” netted $8.3 million at the box office on Thursday, pushing the action sequel’s North American gross to $23.8 million after two days of release. The film, which finds Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt hurtling off cliffs, fighting knife-wielding bad guys on trains and evading pursuers while driving a Fiat through the streets of Rome, was incredibly expensive to produce. Shot during the pandemic (with all the attendant shutdowns, delays and health protocols that were a staple of the COVID era), the budget on the film ballooned to $290 million. So “Mission: Impossible” will need to generate a lot of repeat business if it’s going to turn a profit, and it needs to boom at the global box office.

Tom Cruise appears ageless in his films. But Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie was close to de-aging Cruise as a gimmick in the new film’s opening sequence.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” almost pulled an “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” by opening with an extended sequence featuring a de-aged version of its main star. “Dial of Destiny” de-aged Harrison Ford to mixed results for a 25-minute opener. “Dead Reckoning” director Christopher McQuarrie ultimately nixed an idea to de-age Tom Cruise because the technology just isn’t convincing enough yet. “Originally, there had been a whole sequence at the beginning of the movie that was going to take place in 1989,” McQuarrie told GamesRadar+ and Total Film. “We talked about it as a cold open, we talked about it as flashbacks in the movie, we looked at de-aging.”

Jordan Moreau Henry Czerny received a mission from filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie and chose to accept it. That mission? Return as former IMF chief Eugene Kittridge in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” 27 years after he first appeared in the original “Mission: Impossible” in 1996. At the “Dead Reckoning” premiere in New York, Czerny said when he first got the call about returning to the “Mission: Impossible” world, he didn’t believe it. “I think it’s a joke at first because my reps called me and said they want to bring Kittridge back and I’m in the middle of doing my errands in Los Angeles and fighting traffic or shredding old tax documents,” he told Variety. “I think, ‘Okay, what’s going on really?’ They say, ‘Chris McQuarrie wants to talk to you about bringing Kittridge back,’ and I take it seriously. Two days later, I’m on a call with Chris McQuarrie.”

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has been released.Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the first part follows Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his band of operatives as they chase down a key to deactivate a sentient AI device known as the “Entity”.Alongside returning cast members Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One adds Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales and Pom Klementieff to the franchise.Lorne Balfe returns to compose the score for both parts of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. He previously scored the sixth installment, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, while his other credits include Marvel’s Black Widow, Amazon series The Wheel Of Time and this year’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.You can stream the full soundtrack below.The original Mission: Impossible theme was written and composed by Lalo Schifrin in 1967.

Wondering if you should choose to accept the latest “Mission: Impossible” entry? Maybe you’re sick of all the bombast at the movie theatre lately? Well, put it another way: Do you really want to disappoint Tom Cruise?

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning is the first entry in the blockbuster franchise to span two parts.Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the first part follows Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his band of operatives as they chase down a key to deactivate a sentient AI device known as the “Entity”.Alongside returning cast members Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One adds Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales and Pom Klementieff to the franchise.Both parts of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning were shot back-to-back, with McQuarrie writing and directing both installments.The follow-up is scheduled to be released in cinemas on June 28, 2024. This is less than a year after the first part, which came out on July 10, 2023 in the UK.Along with serving as a direct sequel, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two will feature a bunch of new cast additions, including Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Holt McCallany and Janet McTeer.Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, McQuarrie implied there’s a plan in place for a ninth installment following Part Two.

“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” has arrived ahead of its Wednesday premiere.Unlike the official trailer for the action flick, this latest promotional trailer solely highlights the movie’s action. As the video cuts between Tom Cruise performing seemingly impossible stunts like running on an exploding train and motorcycling off the edge of a cliff, snippets of reviews play appear onscreen. The new teaser doesn’t appear to offer any new footage that hasn’t appeared in the first trailer, but it does emphasize Cruise’s stunts.Set to debut later this week, the movie is averaging a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes.

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