Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part I: Christopher McQuarrie wanted to wreck a train like Buster Keaton for the sequel

Last Updated on May 25, 2023

The dream team of Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie can’t be stopped. They built a new legacy for the Mission: Impossible films by making them the most grandiose of spy-action spectacles. Cruise would even include McQuarrie as a writer on Top Gun: Maverick, which became one of the biggest blockbusters of last year. The duo have put their creative mad minds together to come up with ways to top themselves for the upcoming films — Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part I and Part II.

EW reported on the brainstorming session between Cruise and McQuarrie for the action set pieces of the sequels. McQuarrie would recall, “At the start of this movie, I said to Tom, ‘What do you want to do?’ He said, ‘I want to drive a motorcycle off of a cliff. What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to wreck a train.’ We’re enormous fans of Buster Keaton, John Frankenheimer, David Lean, all of these filmmakers who, at one time or another, had a fabulous train wreck. I thought, ‘I’ve earned that, I want to wreck one too.’”

If you’re the boss at Paramount, you don’t say no to your golden boys, Cruise especially. As a producer on the films, the multi-decade star has managed to talk the studio into letting him do dangerous stunts on many occasions. One of the action sequences highlighted in the film is the bike jump off a cliff that Cruise wanted to do, and he made sure McQuarrie also got to do what he wanted. The production was able to crash a 70-ton train into the Darlton Quarry in the United Kingdom for a scene in the movie. “I think the energy that went into developing it, designing that, building it, and then making a sequence that justified its existence was probably the biggest challenge of my entire life,” McQuarrie reflected.

CinemaCon debuted the first 20 minutes of the film to a roaring reaction, with Paramount Global Chief Bob Bakish calling it an insane achievement. Cruise, as one of the many silver screen purists is fighting to lengthen the window of the movie being shown in theaters so audiences can experience it the way it’s meant to be. Paramount president, Brian Robbins glowed, “After five release dates and a whole bunch of rumors where this movie would end up, we are finally ready to bring this phenomenal movie to where it always belonged, and that is your theaters.”

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part I will be exploding into theaters on July 12.