The pandemic may have resulted in some delays, but we're now less than a year away from Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One arriving in theaters. Production on that wrapped last September, but work is already underway on the sequel, Dead Reckoning Part Two.
Christopher McQuarrie, who helmed Rogue Nation and Fallout, returns for both movies and has now explained the thinking behind naming the next two chapters Dead Reckoning.
"When I came up with the title, I knew it applied more to Part Two than it did to Part One, which is why it eventually settled on being Part One and Part Two," McQuarrie tells Light The Fuse. "The title for the first movie was nearly a title that referred to something like a Ghost Protocol kind of thing, it was a government policy – It wasn't a government policy, it was a government, what would you call it? A government measure of last resort, with catastrophic consequences."
"By the time we got to the end of Part One, that had distilled down into an entirely different set of circumstances that appear in Part Two and not in Part One," the filmmaker continued. "So, the word would no longer have been appropriate for the title of Part One."
"And yet, Dead Reckoning didn't really apply as well to Part One as well as it did to Part Two until we started to play with the beginning of the movie, and kind of recognize that Dead Reckoning, while it sounded cool, what did it really have to do with the movie?"
"And over the course of our, really starting to dig down into the arc of the character journey for Ethan [Hunt], it took on deeper and deeper meanings as we went," McQuarrie concludes. "And you'll see just how thematic and how it represents, how it's conceptually represented in every character's journey in this film we're in."
It's previously been reported that these movies will bring a close to Tom Cruise's time as Ethan Hunt, so all eyes will be on what looks set to be an epic conclusion to this iteration of the Mission: Impossible franchise. The actor, clearly still concerned about pandemic-related delays, is said to want production on Part Two to be completed before Part One is released to make the connection between them feel as seamless as possible.
Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, and Vanessa Kirby are all set to return, though they'll be joined by franchise newcomers Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Rob Delaney, Charles Parnell, Indira Varma, and Mark Gatiss.
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One is set to be released on July 14, 2023, while Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two will follow on June 28, 2024.