The Mission: Impossible franchise has always found new ways to surprise us when it comes to the practical stunts Tom Cruise will perform, but the announcement of the most recent project also surprised fans when it was announced that the next Mission: Impossible story would be divided in half, requiring two movies to complete. While one has to assume that the studio had little problem greenlighting even more Mission: Impossible, director Christopher McQuarrie says it was the story, not the box office that required Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning to be two movies.
Mission: Impossible movies have always been showcases for incredible action. But especially in the time that Christopher McQuarrie has been at the helm, they certainly haven’t skimped on the story either. And because Ethan Hunt works with a team, these are movies with a lot of characters. Speaking with Collider, McQuarrie says that it was ultimately the characters that drove the idea of breaking Dead Reckoning in two because he simply needed more time to create the characters and give them emotional stories. He explained…
Well, we knew with Fallout. Fallout really grew because of all the character and emotion we were putting into the story, all the things that we had discovered in Rogue Nation that was so unexpected. I knew I wanted to expand the cast, and I knew I wanted to give each one of those characters more to do, so I knew the movie was going to be bigger and longer than Fallout. And at which po int I said, ‘Why are we fighting this? Why are we going to try to jam this into two hours? Let’s just break it in half and make it two movies.’ That really was the rationale behind it being a two-part movie. It just it wasn’t just that the story was bigger but that we wanted more emotion in the movie.
There certainly are a lot of characters in the Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One cast. In addition to Tom Cruise and his regular team (including Simon Pegg and Ving Raimes), we see the return of characters we haven’t seen since the first entry in the franchise, as well as several new characters who clearly have stories to tell. One can only imagine how difficult it would be to give all of them enough to do, in a way that would be emotionally satisfying, if they tried to cram it all into a single film.
Dead Reckoning Part One is already a nearly three-hour movie, so a plot that moved twice as fast would have so much story to cover that it’s hard to imagine we’d get to know the characters at all. McQuarrie has said that he specifically wanted to the new movies to have less plot in them because that let the action tell more of the story, and clearly, it also gave us more time with the various characters.
What will happen to our heroes in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two is anybody’s guess right now. However, with so much groundwork already done to introduce characters and plot ideas, one can imagine it will hit the ground running, and with another two or three hours of story to tell, it certainly will have the ability to come to a very emotionally satisfying conclusion.