MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE Director Christopher McQuarrie Teases His "Epic" Two-Part Finale
Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise is gearing up for its big two-part finale, which will bring the franchise to a close. The trailer for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One was pretty awesome and the next story is going to see some characters from Ethan Hunt’s past come back to haunt him. Specifically, Henry Czerny is back as Eugene Kittridge. There’s a lot of excitement building for these films, especially with ths stunts that Cruise is going to pull off!
Well, in a recent interview with Empire Magazine, Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie teases his epic two-part finale and explains the title of the movie. He says:
"There are many things emerging from Ethan's past. 'Dead reckoning' is a navigational term. It means you're picking a course based solely on your last known position and that becomes quite the metaphor not only for Ethan, but several characters.
"The first thing we knew was that if it's gonna be a big two-part adventure, it's got to be epic. It's going to have to be the installment that swallows the rest of the franchise whole. There's just not another way to do it."
When previously talking about the title of the film, the filmmaker said:
"When I came up with the title, I knew it applied more to Part Two than it did to Part One, which is why it eventually settled on being Part One and Part Two," McQuarrie explained in a previous interview with Light the Fuse. "The title for the first movie was nearly ... a title that referred to something like a Ghost Protocol kind of thing, it was a government policy – It wasn't a government policy, it was a government, what would you call it? A government measure of last resort, with catastrophic consequences. By the time we got to the end of Part One, that had distilled down into an entirely different set of circumstances that appear in Part Two and not in Part One. So, the word would no longer have been appropriate for the title of Part One.
"And yet, Dead Reckoning didn't really apply as well to Part One as well as it did to Part Two until we started to play with the beginning of the movie, and kind of recognize that Dead Reckoning, while it sounded cool, what did it really have to do with the movie?" McQuarrie continued. "And over the course of our, really starting to dig down into the arc of the character journey for Ethan [Hunt], it took on deeper and deeper meanings as we went. And you'll see just how thematic and how it represents, how it's conceptually represented in every character's journey in this film we're in."
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will bring back franchise stars Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby and Frederick Schmidt. New additions include Hayley Atwell (Agent Carter), Pom Klementieff (Guardians of the Galaxy), Shea Whigham (Boardwalk Empire), Esai Morales, Rob Delaney (21 Jump Street), Charles Parnell, Indira Varma (Game of Thrones), Mark Gatiss and Cary Elwes (Saw).
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One will be released on July 14th, 2023, and the second part, which is expected to be Cruise’s last Mission: Impossible movie, will be released on June 28, 2024.