Spoilers for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One follow. This message will self-destruct in five seconds.
Unlike Fast X and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning doesn’t leave things on a cliffhanger for its Part One. All told, it’s a relatively complete tale – Ethan has one-upped Gabriel and has The Entity’s key, after all – with a further end goal in mind buried deep in the Arctic Sea.
In our recent interview with Christopher McQuarrie, the director explained the decision to send audiences home satisfied – and why the surprise creative choice was something that kept star Tom Cruise up at night.
"Where we ended the movie was always where we were going to end it," McQuarrie says of the Orient Express set piece. "How we ended the movie was a big, big mystery for us. It kept Tom awake at night throughout production. He would come in all the time and say, 'This can’t be a cliffhanger, it’s got to be satisfying.' The audience has to feel a sense of completion."
McQuarrie continues, "Tom kept looking at that scene and he had all this anxiety about whether or not it would be a satisfying conclusion or whether it would feel open-ended. We constantly revisited it, constantly refined it."
To emphasize the to-and-fro nature of Cruise and McQuarrie’s dilemma, the fond farewell between Ethan Hunt and Hayley Atwell’s Grace before Hunt departs the train was filmed two years after cameras initially rolled on production. "Tom has his hair from Part Two and he’s in a wig!" McQuarrie jokes.
Then, McQuarrie outlines his Mission: Impossible mission statement on why everything feels a little cleaner than we may have anticipated: "If you leave it with a cliffhanger, it feels a little bit like we’re expecting you to come back," the director says of the ending. "We didn’t want that feeling. The feeling we were reaching for – and we hope you feel – is we dare you not to come back. We want to leave you thinking, 'Oh, I can’t wait to see what happens next.'"
In case you were wondering, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two is out in cinemas on June 28, 2024. For more on our Mission: Impossible coverage, check out:
