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Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has an unlikely Mission: Impossible 3 callback, one that could have far-reaching ramifications as we inch towards the end of the action franchise.
You may have been too dazzled by Tom Cruise's showreel of stunts in the first trailer for The Final Reckoning to notice, at the 1:35 mark, Ethan Hunt picks up a container marked 'Biohazard'.
That isn't just any MacGuffin. It's eerily similar – if not identical – to the all-powerful biological weapon the Rabbit's Foot that enters the radar of Philip Seymour Hoffman's Owen Davian in the J.J. Abrams-directed threequel.
"That’s not a shot from MI3, because we never see how Ethan Hunt actually got it during that heist," Slash Film's Ethan Anderton opined. "Looks like a digitally de-aged Tom Cruise back there, so how will this come into play?"
So, plot purposes, misdirects, and de-aging are all early contenders – and Final Reckoning's director has already said "never say never" when it comes to de-aging Tom Cruise, despite dropping the idea in Dead Reckoning.
"Originally, there had been a whole sequence at the beginning of the movie that was going to take place in 1989,” McQuarrie told GamesRadar+ and the Inside Total Film podcast last year. "We talked about it as a cold open, we talked about it as flashbacks in the movie, we looked at de-aging."
The director continued, "One of the big things about [the de-aging] I was looking at while researching, I kept saying, 'Boy, this de-aging is really good' or 'This de-aging is not so good.' Never did I find myself actually following the story… In researching that, I cracked the code – I think – on how best to approach it. By then, we had kind of moved away from it. We may still play with it. We never say never."
