After a long five years gap, finally ‘Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part One’ was released on July 12 and within no time, it has become the latest blockbuster from Hollywood. As the seventh installment is divided into two parts, we heard that Tom Cruise did not want to leave the first part on a cliffhanger.
In a recent interview with Total Film Magazine, director Christopher McQuarrie explained how they finally let the audiences leave the theatres satisfied. He said, “Where we ended the movie was always where we were going to end it. 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.”
Unlike ‘Fast X’ (2023) and ‘Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse’ (2023), which left moviegoers in a massive cliffhanger, ‘Dead Reckoning Part One’ ended with Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) achieving his immediate goal and Grace’s (Hayley Atwell) accepting an offer to join the IMF.
“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”, McQuarrie further continued while explaining the situation.
According to the director, if they left the film on a cliffhanger, it would seem like the makers are wanting the audiences to come back, “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’.”
