Mission: Impossible director explains why he’s making back-to-back movies

Christopher McQuarrie directed the two most recent Mission: Impossible movies: Rogue Nation and Fallout. Both of those movies were well-reviewed and cleaned up at the box office, so he’s officially on a roll. McQuarrie will return to helm the next two movies in the franchise, both of which are due to come out in 2022. He’s filming these new movies back to back.

We don’t know the title for the upcoming movie, although Production Weekly tells us that the working title is “Libra,” if that’s any hint. It’s probably best not to read too much into it, as the working title for Fallout was “Gemini.”

Speaking to the Mission: Impossible podcast Light The Fuse, the 51-year-old director explained why he chose to tell the next chapter in Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) story over two films. “I said to Tom, ‘I really want to make it more of an emotional journey for [Ethan Hunt],” he said. “Going into this, I said, ‘I want to take what we learned from Fallout and apply it to every character in the movie. I want everyone to have an emotional arc.”

"We realised we had a movie that was two hours, 40 minutes long. And every scene in it was necessary. The ending of the first movie snapped into place. We knew what the ending was and we knew what the beginning was. And now I had two sequences, which means, I’ve got 40 minutes of ‘Mission: Impossible 8’ figured out."

Mission: Impossible 7 will see Henry Czerny make his return to the franchise as Eugene Kittridge for the first time since the original 1996 movie, which is very exciting for fans. And McQuarrie teased that Czerny might not be the only actor to make a surprise return. “Any character, dead or alive, is fair game to return.”

Production of the seventh installment has been put on hiatus after filming was shut down due to the coronavirus, putting it in a similar position to nearly every other movie and TV show. Filming was meant to take place in Venice for several weeks, but it’s been stopped. Whether this will affect the release date in any way remains to be seen.

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