Christopher Macquarrie: Last News

Director Christopher McQuarrie previously revealed that a flashback segment that would have de-aged Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One was briefly considered.

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.

Tom Cruise has confirmed that he is still planning to make a movie that will be filmed in space.The pioneering movie was announced back in 2020, confirming that Cruise had teamed up with Elon Musk and NASA to film a new movie in outer space, set to be directed by Edge of Tomorrow‘s Doug Liman.A trip to outer space to film the project was then set for 2021, but ended up being postponed.Despite this, Cruise has insisted that work on the project continues, and that he intends to still make the film.Asked about progress on the film at the Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One premiere, Cruise said (via Variety): “We’ve been working on it diligently and we’ll see where we go.”NASA confirmed their involvement in the project via Twitter, where administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted: “NASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station!“We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA’s ambitious plans a reality.”The film, still untitled, was pitched to Universal via an “exuberant Zoom call” with Cruise, Liman, Christopher McQuarrie and PJ van Sandwijk.Liman is in the process of writing the film’s script, and the budget is estimated to be around $200 million. McQuarrie, who is the writer/director on the Mission: Impossible films, will act as story advisor and producer, alongside Cruise, Liman and van Sandwijk as producers.Elsewhere, Cruise has said that he plans to still be making Mission: Impossible films when he’s 80.“Harrison Ford is a legend; I hope to be still going.

**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.

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.

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 Named after a word that sounds similar in Korean to both “spring” and “tiger,” Pom Klementieff has appropriately showcased ebullience and viciousness throughout her career — and especially in the past few months. In May, she reprised her role as Mantis in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” empathetically shepherding her fellow outcasts through an adventure to save Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) from unapologetic MCU villain the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). She also appears in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” as Paris, a ruthless assassin who will stop at nothing to kill Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and anyone else who gets in her way. Ahead of “Dead Reckoning Part One,” Klementieff spoke to Variety about her character in the film, whose backstory she worked closely with Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie to develop. In addition to talking about how she “manifested” the opportunity to be a part of the franchise, she revealed the panorama of influences — from Jean-Paul Belmondo to animal videos on YouTube — she enlisted to ensure that audiences never forget Paris.

EXCLUSIVE: Hayley Atwell predicted that she’d be on strike now.

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.”

Missions: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One stars Pom Klementieff and Vanessa Kirby were present when Tom Cruise performed one of the most dangerous stunts in cinema history – and they were understandably stunned.Speaking to NME, the pair explained how they watched Cruise drive a motorbike off the top of a cliff six times while shooting the franchise’s latest instalment. You can watch their full interview above.“It was mind-blowing,” said Klementieff, who stars in the film as French assassin Paris.Kirby, who reprises her role Alana Mitsopolis, added: “Everyone else was so nervous and fearful, and he wasn’t.

Tom Cruise still has every opportunity blast off into space.

Tom Cruise is ready to go where no actor has gone before. The 61-year-old star offered a recent update on an exciting project that is planned to be filmed in outerspace. In 2020, it was revealed that Cruise was working with NASA and Elon Musk's SpaceX on a movie that would be shot at the International Space Station.

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.”