Mission: Impossible Director Is “Freaked Out” About Making the Next Two Sequels

Mission: Impossible writer-director Christopher McQuarrie admits he’s “freaked out” over the back-to-back sequels slated for release in 2021 and 2022.

“I pitched the idea of making two movies, and now I have to justify why it’s two movies,” McQuarrie told Empire.

“You’ve got to earn that. You’ve got to make something that swallows the last three movies whole. I’m freaked out now. We’ve talked ourselves into something. Holy sh-t.”

McQuarrie helmed the long-running franchise’s fifth and sixth installments, Rogue Nation and last summer’s Fallout, each bigger and bolder than their respective predecessors — but as far as going sky-high, McQuarrie had a pause for thought.

“Here’s the problem with going to the moon,” he said. “How do you fall from the moon?”

That comes after McQuarrie in November promised star and producer Tom Cruise “already has a lot of really big ideas” for films seven and eight. “World-topping sh-t.”

Taking the high-octane franchise into space “would be entirely up to SpaceX or NASA,” McQuarrie told Collider. “They would have to be involved with that, I would imagine. Or Paramount Pictures. I don’t know how much they want to invest.”

Cruise already admitted to mulling over the idea, telling Collider, “We’ve thought about it.”

“It’s like how do we do it? It’s the mechanics of getting it there. How do you build a sequence there and how long can we have that sequence?” Cruise said.

“Because if I went up and just dropped, it’s the kind of time — how do you put that into the structure of a screenplay of a Mission? When we’re doing these things, there’s so much story going on. As opposed to just a cool shot, we want character and story going throughout. I can’t help but look at that building up here or at the Eiffel Tower and seeing stories. What could the team do and what could we do? But we have thought about that.”

Studio Paramount has dated its pair of untitled Mission: Impossible sequels for July 23, 2021 and August 5, 2022.

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