“Mission: Impossible” writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and franchise star/producer Tom Cruise heard the criticisms of 2023’s “Dead Reckoning” loud and clear, and made very concerted efforts to ensure 2025’s “The Final Reckoning” reached the series’ high bar for quality. The problem was, once they got into the editing room, McQuarrie and Cruise realized one of their big gambles on “The Final Reckoning” didn’t work.
“We looked at the film very, very critically and said, ‘OK where could we have done better?’” McQuarrie told Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, noting that it would have been easy to blame “Barbenheimer” on the somewhat disappointing box office for “Dead Reckoning” (it grossed $571 million worldwide vs. $874 million for “Fallout”) but they wanted to listen to the audience.
Paramount made one change for the next film – instead of “Dead Reckoning – Part 2,” the eighth film in the franchise was retitled “The Final Reckoning” and the seventh film retroactively dropped the “Part 1.”
The next order of business for McQuarrie and Cruise was to try to make this new movie shorter.
“We then said alright let’s try to make a shorter movie out of this one, and we pivoted and deconstructed the entire movie and I built a non-linear version of this film and shot it to be non-linear in order to move certain critical scenes earlier in this story, particularly Mt. Weather, the scene with Ethan and the president because that’s where Ethan’s journey kicks off.”
But best laid plans and all that – the assembled cut of “The Final Reckoning” that told the story out of order didn’t play.
“It was very clear as soon as we assembled it, it did not work. So Tom said, ‘Just make it linear.’ I made it linear, it did not work,” McQuarrie continued. “And when I made it linear, why it didn’t work is every scene you put first was a scene where they were talking about The Entity before you knew what The Entity was. Which is why we then created that opening, that cold intro that just says here it is.”
The fix was to create the current opening of the film, which uses voiceover to explain what The Entity is, what it wants and how it operates so that when the rest of the movie kicked into gear, the audience was up to speed.
Other planned narrative threads from “Dead Reckoning” also fell by the wayside, namely the backstory between Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and Esai Morales’ villainous Gabriel.
“Everything in the movie that you have questions about, we shot the s—t out of. We hate exposition but we don’t avoid it, and we shoot it and overshoot it and overinform and overinclude and then are constantly pulling back how much do you need to know. The truth of the matter was that flash to it at the beginning of the story coincides with a line of exposition that summarizes what that is.”
McQuarrie also said the delays that pushed “The Final Reckoning” further away from the release of “Dead Reckoning” gave them “permission” to make the eighth film a standalone entry.
“I shot a backstory, I shot a sequence that told you a little bit more about their relationship and the truth of the matter was that unless I made that movie, it’s always going to feel somewhat ambiguous and open-ended anyway so we just said screw it,” he continued. “The other thing is we knew that because of the strikes and everything else, we were that much farther away from ‘Dead Reckoning.’ If it had come out the following summer, that would’ve been different. But there was so much distance on the movie, that gave us the permission we needed to just let ‘Dead Reckoning’ go and make this a standalone movie.”
Watch the full interview below.
The post After ‘Dead Reckoning’ Criticism, ‘Mission: Impossible’ Director Tried to Make ‘Final Reckoning’ Non-Linear – But It Didn’t Work appeared first on TheWrap.