Mission: Impossible star says Tom Cruise regrets his character's death

Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible — (Image credit: Paramount Pictures)

Emilio Estevez's stint in the Mission: Impossible franchise may only have been short-lived (to put it lightly – his character doesn't make it through the first scene of the first movie), but the actor says Tom Cruise regrets killing him off.

"The way Tom had explained it, he said, 'Look, I’d love for you to come and join the cast. The whole opening number where everybody gets wiped out, it’s going to be a lot of well-known people and all of them are going to go uncredited and it’s really going to set up the level of peril for Ethan,'" Estevez recalled in a recent interview with Uproxx. "And I said, 'I’m in. You don’t have to ask me twice, I’m in.' And then afterwards, obviously, the movie’s a giant hit."

The first Mission: Impossible movie, released in 1996, opens with a failed mission in Prague, where every one of Ethan Hunt (Cruise)'s IMF team members are killed one by one in front of him, leaving Hunt as the only survivor. Estevez's character, equipment technician Jack Harmon, is one of those team members.

"[They’re] still making them! Tom was like, we were doing a run the year after that and he says, 'Man, we made such a mistake killing you off,'" Estevez added. "He and [Mission: Impossible 2 director] John Woo were trying to figure out a way to bring me back for Part Two, but it just didn’t make sense," he said. "I thought you could have because with all the masks, right?"

The second movie was released in 2000, with a total of six installments having been released to date. The final two movies in the series, titled Dead Reckoning Part One and Part Two, are slated to hit the big screen in 2023 and 2024.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One arrives in theaters on July 14. While we wait, check out our guide to the other most highly anticipated movie release dates in 2023.