Across five films, “Mission: Impossible” has unapologetically established itself as the espionage franchise where you come to see big spectacular stunts all loosely connected by a story you’ll forget about five minutes after you leave the cinema (seriously, can anybody break down the plot of ‘Rogue Nation‘ without looking it up?). Audiences pay to come see Tom Cruise do the, well, impossible, but Christopher McQuarrie wants to try and change things up for the next installment.
Speaking on the Scriptnotes podcast (via Collider), the director discussed the challenge of keeping ‘Mission: Impossible’ fresh, and differentiating it from other franchises. And it sounds like this time around, he wants to give Ethan Hunt a little more soul.
READ MORE: The 50 Best Action Movies Of The 21st Century So Far
“You know, you worry all the time. Am I taking this in a way that it can’t go? And we had a big conversation about tone. Because [‘Ghost Protocol‘ director] Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise and ‘Rogue Nation’ embraced that tone completely,” he explained. “At the beginning of this I said to Tom, ‘I don’t think we can do that three in a row. I think now it’s going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still.’ And we did. But now we find ourselves going, you know, are we going where Bond went where Bond became — serious. It’s another kind of tone. Which, by the way, has not hurt their bottom line at all. They’ve really found their place. But we can’t go there. We were sort of laughing because we were looking at ‘Rogue Nation’ and saying, ‘Well thanks, Bond, for not doing that anymore, so we’ll do it.’ Now we’re looking at it and going, ‘But we can’t keep doing that.’ We suddenly hit that same wall and understood why Bond went the way they did. And we’re at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise saying well how dramatic can you take Mission? It’s not going to a dark place. It’s going to a more emotionally dramatic place.”
I dunno, I don’t really want to get invested in Ethan Hunt’s life or feelings — I was want him to leap off trains and get the MacGuffin to wherever it needs to go. But then again, I haven’t really enjoyed any of the post-“Casino Royale” Bond films either.
Thoughts? Let us know in the comments section.