Brad Bird will not return for Mission: Impossible 5

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL certainly proved to the world that Brad Bird can direct live action just as well as he can handle animation. But, the director confirmed that he will not be returning to the franchise for a second round.

When asked if he would return for a sequel, Bird said no, I think that one of the things that’s fun about the series is that they always pull in a different director and try to get a different kind of take on the premise. I’d probably be open to looking at it, but I think that part of one of the successes of the franchises is that they’re always reassessing it with a new director. That was one of the things that attracted me to it. It’s not a franchise where it was about dismissing your style in order to get the style of the franchise. It was more about [having] each director influence the franchise. Because whatever you think about the films, they don’t look like they were made by the same person. They’re the same premise and the same lead actor and all of that, but they feel like four distinctly different movies, style-wise.

It will be a shame since GHOST PROTOCOL was my favorite in the franchise. Bird also went on to share some other interesting information about working on the film and other projects.

On Michelle Monaghan’s character: Well, we were well into the film thinking that she had been killed, and filmed quite a bit of the film thinking that she wasn’t around, and we just kept thinking that that kind of cast the previous movie in a negative light because it’s kind of like all that stuff that he went through to keep her alive in the last one didn’t ultimately amount to anything. It was kind of like… Simon Pegg mentioned that it was kind of like the feeling that you had about Aliens after seeing Alien 3, where she goes through unbelievable hell to save a couple of people, and then both of them died before the third movie.

On what he wanted to explore most in a spy movie: When I first got involved in the film, J.J. asked me, “Are there any things that you would love to see in a spy movie?” And I listed about five things, and one them was that idea, that I wanted the gadgets to be as unreliable as they are in life, you know? They enjoyed that idea and were very supportive.

On 1906, his long in development earthquake disaster epic: I’ve not cracked it yet. It’s still an idea that I’m attracted to. It’s an incredibly challenging idea to get into a single movie. I don’t think that you can break it up into two, and have 1906 II: The Rebuilding. I think that the challenge is that it’s a very sprawling canvas, and you want to get it all in one film and have it be satisfying and take advantage of all the wonderful things that that idea, that that particular place at that moment in time, has to offer. But it’s a very challenging thing to get to work as a script.

No matter what genre Bird decides to tackle next, it will be widely anticipated.  I, for one, would love to see 1906 hit the big screen.  I read the novel which is just as sprawling and epic as he makes it seem.  Hopefully someone will get behind him all the way and let him loose with a blank check.  Because as we can see so far, the man delivers the goods.