NEW YORK (AP) — There are, as a rule, only so many places you can go as an action movie after leaving Tom Cruise clinging to the side of an Airbus A400M and…
— There are, as a rule, only so many places you can go as an action movie after leaving Tom Cruise clinging to the side of an Airbus A400M and flinging him out a cargo plane at 25,000 feet.
But in the kinetic, headlong world of “Mission: Impossible,” the pressure to keep upping the ante — like the films’ always-running star — never stops.
“Every time we finish a movie, the first thing Tom says to me is: We can do better,” says Christopher McQuarrie.
McQuarrie, the writer-director of 2015’s “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” and the 2018 franchise high point, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout,” was working with Cruise on “Top Gun: Maverick ” (which McQuarrie co-wrote and co-produced) when they started talking about their ambitions for the next iteration of “Mission: Impossible.”
Their plan was to make not one but two sequels: Back-to-back blockbusters that would feature even bigger stunts — Cruise envisioned a motorcycle jump-slash-skydive — and a massive train sequence that McQuarrie pined to realize. The heady experience on “Maverick,” a pop-culture juggernaut that grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide, only further ratcheted up their aspirations.
“‘Top Gun: Maverick’ really taught us a lot in terms of character dynamics and the emotional payoff of the movie overall,” McQuarrie said in a recent interview. “To be making movies on this scale, you really need to think about, more than anything, the feeling that the audience is left with going away.”
A year after the box-office dominance of “Maverick”, McQuarrie and Cruise are back with another high-flying spectacle of daring-do. Similar to “Maverick,” “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is a state-of-the-art action extravaganza of old-school technique, made with star power, practical effects and stunt work designed to prompt exclamations of “He did what?”
It was also their most nearly impossible mission yet – and not just because of, according to Paramount Pictures, the 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps that Cruise did in preparation for his climactic stunt. “Dead Reckoning” was just days away from beginning production in Venice when COVID-19 cases began skyrocketing in Italy, an early epicenter.
“Mission: Impossible” was one of the first major productions to be shut down by the pandemic. Months later, Cruise and “Dead Reckoning” – a globe-trotting $290 million movie so logistically complicated that it prompted controversy for initial plans to blow up a century-old bridge in Poland – led an industry-wide effort to get movie business back on line during the pandemic.
