Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie reveals his scrapped plans for a Superman movie, and I'm convinced Tom Cruise was meant to play Green Lantern

Christopher McQuarrie has teased his "epic" pitch for a Superman movie – and it involved Green Lantern.

"I'll never tell, but boy, was it fucking good," McQuarrie told the Happy Sad Confused podcast when asked about the story he pitched to follow 2013's Man of Steel. "Green Lantern was what had come to me, and Green Lantern's a tough one. And I cracked it."

"The whole concept of Green Lantern is the ring has to be recharged and that's not a bug, that's a feature," McQuarrie continued. "Yes, you have infinite power, but you only have so much battery life and that can run out at inconvenient times. That, for me, solved the whole Green Lantern problem."

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McQuarrie is a long-time collaborator of Tom Cruise's, so it's hard not to imagine that he might have had the Mission: Impossible star in mind for the role of Hal Jordan. He went on to joke about the hero's costume (Ryan Reynolds controversially wore a fully CGI suit in the 2011 movie), but added, "I realized, don't worry about the costume, worry about the character, and how do you give that character tension and stakes and, also, how do you do it with Superman? Henry [Cavill] had a take on that, and I suddenly realized how these two characters had amazing similarities, which also allowed for amazing conflict and an amazing universe-expanding resolution."

The writer-director also alluded to the movie's opener, which earned an unexpected comparison. "You remember Pixar's Up? A sequence with no dialogue?" McQuarrie asked. "The first five minutes of the movie was a set-up after which you knew exactly what made Superman tick and exactly what Superman was most afraid of and why Superman made the choices that he made, and it would have been epic. In five minutes, the scale of the movie would have been absolutely extraordinary."

McQuarrie and Cruise first worked together in 2008 on Valkyrie, which McQuarrie wrote and produced and Cruise starred in. The pair went on to collaborate on two Jack Reacher movies, Edge of Tomorrow, The Mummy, Top Gun: Maverick, and four Mission: Impossible films.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is out now in theaters. For more on the movie, check out our Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning review, or get up to speed with our guide to watching the Mission: Impossible movies in order.