‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning’ Editor Talks Reshaping the Film’s Nearly Four-Hour First Cut

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.

**Spoilers below for “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part 1.” You’ve been warned…** The threat of death is an underlying aspect of every ‘Mission: Impossible’ film. Honestly, that threat doesn’t just apply to the characters and their gunfights and elaborate car chases.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Angelique Jackson It’s 10 a.m. in Sydney, where Hayley Atwell is preparing to walk the red carpet as the “Mission: Impossible” crew’s newest member, joining producer and star Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s ensemble of battle-hardened actors. “This is a pure cinematic experience. It’s unadulterated entertainment, and of a huge scale,” Atwell says to Variety about “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” which finally hit theaters on July 12 following a two-year delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Flashy events like the Australia premiere (which featured a fireworks spectacle in honor of Cruise’s 61st birthday on July 3) mark the end of a four-year odyssey that pushed Atwell’s limits physically — leaving her hanging inside a train car that’s gone from horizontal to vertical, gripping anything nailed to the floor/wall/ceiling lest she fall to her death (or at least the safety rigging below) — and saw her creating a cunning character within the “M:I” universe.

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.

Can Tom Cruise save summer?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it…

Zack Sharf Digital News Director According to Tom Cruise’s frequent “Mission: Impossible” director Christopher McQuarrie, the mega-star actor once told him that the “weirdest story” he ever heard about himself was that his co-stars “were not allowed to look me in the eye.” McQuarrie and the rest of his “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” cast told The Times of London that rumor is just a myth. Simon Pegg said Cruise is far more generous and fun than that rumor suggests, and that he even “took us go-karting and zip-lining” during off hours on “Dead Reckoning Part One.” “I’ve been able to hack my way through all the bizarre mythology that surrounds him,” added Pegg, who has starred in every “Mission: Impossible” movie opposite Cruise since 2011’s “Ghost Protocol.” “On one side he’s Tom Cruise — this enigmatic film star everyone wants to know about. And on the other he’s just a guy. I like being normal with him.”