While audiences eagerly await the next chapter in the franchise, Tom Cruise is looking back on why David Fincher's Mission: Impossible 3 didn't happen. The third installment in the long-running action franchise saw Cruise's Ethan Hunt now retired from fieldwork for the Impossible Missions Force and instead training recruits for their various assignments and getting ready to settle down with his fiancée Julia, who's unaware of his real job. When a former trainee of his is captured and killed while on a mission, Hunt must get back to the action in the hopes of capturing the elusive arms dealer behind her death.
Cruise returned to lead the cast of Mission: Impossible 3 alongside fellow franchise vet Ving Rhames and newcomers Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michelle Monaghan, Billy Crudup, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Keri Russell, Maggie Q and Laurence Fishburne. Hitting theaters in 2006, the film scored generally favorable reviews from critics and audiences alike, all of whom largely considered it an improvement over John Woo's Mission: Impossible 2 six years prior, and would go on to be a box office hit, grossing over $399 million against its $150 million production budget. While J.J. Abrams took the helm for Mission: Impossible 3, another A-list director nearly got their hands on the franchise though one major reason ultimately led to their departure.
While appearing on the Light the Fuse podcast, Tom Cruise opened up on the longer development cycle Mission: Impossible 3 endured. When asked about David Fincher's brief attachment to the threequel, the franchise producer/star said that while he would like to work with the director on another project, his vision for the film wasn't what Cruise wanted for the project. See what Cruise said below:
“We didn’t move forward because they just… like any movie… you know, he’s so talented, and it would’ve just been very different. […] [There are] a lot of people, and I’ve worked with a lot of writers and different directors on it, that never really grasp what works about the franchise. […] So, that’s where we went… it just wasn’t something that was— I don’t know what it would’ve been, it wasn’t kind of embracing what Mission is, and wanting to embrace it in a way that you gotta… You know, how to use the theme music, and how to entertain that kind of, that audience with them, in a way that… you know, and I admire [the directors once attached to Mission: Impossible movies], I’d love to work with them on other things, but you just go, this is something that is, having lived with it, and understanding that communication with the audience, that I wanna deliver on those expectations for an audience… so I don’t know what those films would have been like, really.”
As Cruise notes, the Mission: Impossible franchise was a revolving door of writers and directors for its first four films, with Brian De Palma helping launch the movie series followed by John Woo, Abrams and Brad Bird with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. It wasn't until the fifth film, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation in which Cruise finally found his perfect writer and director for the series in Christopher McQuarrie, with whom he'd previously collaborated on 2012's Jack Reacher and having contributed writing and producing credits to its 2016 sequel, 2008's Valkyrie, 2014's Edge of Tomorrow, 2017's The Mummy and the recently released Top Gun: Maverick. McQuarrie would go on to helm 2018's Mission: Impossible — Fallout, which is both the highest-grossing and best-received installment in the franchise, and the next two sequels Dead Reckoning Part One, slated for a July 2023 release, and Part Two, which is currently filming leading up to its June 2024 release.
Development on Mission: Impossible 3 proved more of a rollercoaster than most other installments with Fincher not being the only director to come and go from the project as Smokin' Aces' Joe Carnahan was also attached for over a year and had brought on Carrie-Anne Moss, Scarlett Johansson and Kenneth Branagh for the cast, only for him to quit after creative differences regarding the film's tone. While McQuarrie's sequels have been the better received of the bunch, most fans of the franchise agree that Mission: Impossible 3 served as the first step forward in the series' evolution thanks to its faster pace, larger scale set pieces and Cruise's emotional performance, making the decision to bring on Abrams in favor of David Fincher ultimately the better one. Audiences can revisit Mission: Impossible 3 streaming on Fubo and Showtime now.
Source: Light the Fuse
- Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)Release date: Jul 14, 2023
- Mission: Impossible 8 (2024)Release date: Jun 28, 2024