It Looks Like MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 7 Will Resume Shooting in September
Production on Mission: Impossible 7 has been temporarily shut down for about three months now, but it’s looking like director Christopher McQuarrie and star Tom Cruise will be getting back to work soon!
First assistant director Tommy Gormley has confirmed that filming might resume in September. While speaking on BBC Radio 4 (via Variety), Gormley said that despite the major production delay, the team is still confident that they can meet the target timeframe of the production:
“We hope to restart in September. We hope to visit all the countries we planned to. We hope to do a big chunk of it back in the U.K. on the backlot and in the studio.”
When asked about the difficulties of filming a huge project like this during the pandemic, he explained:
“This is our challenge. We are not a chamber piece movie. We do spectacle, and that is what people expect of us. If we have the protocols in place and we break down all the procedures very carefully…we will get it going again. Some things are very challenging such as stunt scenes, crowd scenes etc. but we can’t do a ‘Mission Impossible’ movie and not have a fight scene or car scenes in it.”
This news comes not long after confirmation that the British Film Commission released their COVID-19 safety guidelines that will allow film and high-end TV productions to resume in the UK.
We still don’t have any story details to share, but when talking about why this story was being split into two films, McQuarrie explained:
“When we went into making Fallout, I said to Tom, 'I really want to make this more of an emotional journey for [Cruise's character Ethan Hunt].’ Going into this, I said, 'I want to take what we learned from Fallout and apply it to every character in the movie. I want everyone to have an emotional arc. ... I just want the movie to have more feeling across the board.
"We realized we had a movie that was two hours, 40 minutes long. And every scene in it was necessary."
We also know that Hayley Atwell’s character will play major part in the story and has been described as “a destructive force of nature” that will impact the core team in ways that will "evolve" the franchise.
Paramount Pictures recently pushed back the release date of the seventh installment, which will now debut November 19, 2021. The eighth entry has also been delayed and will hit the big screen on November 4, 2022.
Cruise is joined in the film by Hayley Atwell (Agent Carter), Rebecca Ferguson (Doctor Sleep), Simon Pegg (Ready Player One), Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction), Vanessa Kirby (Hobbs & Shaw) and Henry Czerny (Ready or Not) along with newcomers Shea Whigham (Joker), Pom Klementieff (Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Avengers: Infinity War) and Esai Morales (La Bamba, Titans) as the villain.