2023 is the year of Hollywood movies split in half: after “Fast & Furious 10” and “Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse” were just the first installment of a blockbuster doppelgänger, “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is now the same. As the very wordy title already makes clear, here follows “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two” (according to the plan already in June 2024). But there is a big difference between “Mission: Impossible 7” and “Fast X” and the new “Spider-Man”:
Namely, while “Fast and Furious 10” And “About The Spider-VerseEach ending on a proper cliffhanger, Tom Cruise wanted to avoid just that with “Mission: Impossible 7”.director Christopher McQuarrie tells the magazine cheated.
Unlike “Fast & Furious 10” and “Across The Spider-Verse”
“The movie always has to end where it ends,” McQuarrie explains, meaning with the big action scene on the Orient Express. “How the movie ends, however, was a big, big mystery to us. It kept Tom Cruise awake at night while filming. He kept coming and said: It shouldn’t be a cliffhanger, it should be satisfying. The audience needs to feel like there’s a closure.’”
You watched the last scene over and over, kept working on it until Tom Cruise was satisfied with it at some point. And McQuarrie even has the right example: the scene in which Ethan and Grace (Hayley Atwell) say goodbye on the train was only filmed two years (!) after the actual shooting as part of so-called reshoots.
“Bet you want to see part 2 anyway?”
But why exactly did Tom Cruise want to avoid a cliffhanger on “Mission: Impossible 7”? Christopher McQuarrie explained that too : “When a movie ends on a cliffhanger, it’s kind of like we’re expecting you [für Teil 2] come back,” says the director. But you didn’t want that. Instead, they wanted the audience to feel like they couldn’t make it to part 2 on their own: “We want a feeling of ‘bet you can’t make it without watching part 2?’. We wanted you to leave the theater thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see what happens next.’”
In plain language: Christopher McQuarrie, Tom Cruise and Co. were so confident that audiences would pour into theaters for “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 2” after all that they didn’t feel the need to artificially inflate the tension with an open ending. In fact Part 1 ends with a win for Ethan Hunt and Co. (namely, the capture of the key), even though the entity and its accomplice Gabriel have not yet been defeated…
We need to find out how “Mission: Impossible 8 – Dead Reckoning Part Two” continues in theaters on June 27, 2024. This start date is uncertain due to the current strikes in Hollywood.