Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible franchise does a decent job of reinventing its wheel each time out. There's usually a new director behind the camera, from JJ Abrams to Brad Bird to Christopher McQuarrie. And the action franchise hops and skips around the globe with the frequency of a Bond sequel, visiting everywhere from Australia to Vienna and back to Langley, Virginia... home of the CIA. This time out, though, the big change will be that the focus of the story isn't on the mission at hand. It will be all about Ethan Hunt.
While preparing to shoot Mission: Impossible 6, writer-director Christopher McQuarrie opened up about his unique approach to this sequel to Empire, and explained to them:
I've seen five of these movies and I don't know who Ethan Hunt is. One movie sort of dealt with his personal life; the other movies are about people speculating what's really going on in Ethan's head. I want to know who Ethan is in this movie, I want an emotional journey for this character, and Tom really embraced it.
The movie Christopher McQuarrie is likely speaking of is JJ Abrams' Mission: Impossible 3, which showed us some of Ethan Hunt's home life, and really stepped up that side of the equation when it placed his fiancee, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), in harms way. This was a fresh approach to the usually mechanical Ethan Hunt, and when the spy opened himself up to a woman, it almost got both of them killed.
This doesn't mean that Mission: Impossible 6 is going to be a dialogue-heavy character study. Quite the contrary, as Christopher McQuarrie went on to explain:
So I put Ethan in a bunch of complicated moral quandaries, and I'm trying to find ways to connect them -- and then, ironically, the way to connect them was through giant action scenes.
You see, you can't get Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise together in a room to hash out possibilities without amping up the danger and putting the bankable action star in some compromising position. In the same interview, McQuarrie noted:
I may have found something today. I came to Tom with a picture of something and Tom looked at it and said, 'That's awesome! I want to fall off of that!' It's like, OK, I can see it on a poster, and I can see Tom falling off of it.
Because Mission: Impossible 6 films in Paris, does that mean the Eiffel Tower?
Mission: Impossible 6 stars Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson (from Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation) and is rumored to feature Jeremy Renner. We expect familiar faces like Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Alec Baldwin to tag along, as well. The movie is aiming for a July 27, 2018 release date. We'll continue to track the sequel's progress right here on CinemaBlend.
