MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE Director Explains Why The Next Story Was Split Into Two Films

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty pumped up about the next two Mission: Impossible films that are coming from director Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise. I liked the fact that the creative team decided to split the next story into two films, and there’s a reason for that.

During a recent interview with the Light the Fuse podcast, the director opened up about the movie and explained why he wanted to tell this particular story over the course of two films, and it’s because he wanted all of the characters to have an emotional arc:

"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."

McQuarrie goes on to explains that he sees the Mission: Impossible movies as being divided into 20-minute segments, and once he removed two of them from the next film, Mission: Impossible 7, the story came together in a really profound way. He went on to say:

"The ending of the first movie snapped into place. We knew what the ending was and we knew what the beginning was. And now I had these two sequences, which means, I've got 40 minutes of Mission: Impossible 8 figured out."

Cruise will be joined by Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Henry Czerny. Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, and Nicholas Hoult in the next films.

We can also expect to see some epic stuntwork for Cruise! The filmmaker previously teased that Cruise was training for some terrifying and obscene stunts in these sequels. He explained:

“He’s not going to space, nor does he need to go to space. We’ve figured out three obscene things that he’s doing that I’m terrified of, that make the helicopter chase look like tinker toys. [Tom Cruise is] training and he calls me and describes what he’s doing and I laugh and I cheer, then I hang up and I puke into a bucket. He’s training quite intensely right now.”

Cruise is going to space to shoot a movie, though! It’s just not a Mission: Impossible movie.

Mission: Impossible 7 film will be released on July 23rd, 2021, while Mission: Impossible 8 will be released on August 5th, 2022.