Mission: Impossible Director Details Scrapped Man of Steel 2 With Henry Cavill’s Superman & Green Lantern Movie

Christopher McQuarrie had an impossible mission: get a Superman movie off the ground at DC Films. The Mission: Impossible filmmaker — who co-wrote, wrote, and directed the last four entries in the Tom Cruise-fronted franchise, including The Final Reckoning — had been linked to a potential Man of Steel 2 as far back as 2018, when then-Superman actor Henry Cavill played the mustachioed villain of that year’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout. McQuarrie told ComicBook at the time that he and Cavill had discussed story ideas for a followup to the Zack Snyder-directed reboot that launched the DC Extended Universe in 2013.

“Somebody asked, ‘Would you do it?’ and I said ‘Hey, they know where to find me,’” McQuarrie said of studio Warner Bros. “Nobody’s asked, but you know.”

Asked about his Superman pitch in a new interview pegged to Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, McQuarrie teased, “I’ll never tell. I’ll never tell, but boy, was it f—ing good. It was f—ing good.”

RELATED: Superman Star Nathan Fillion Calls Live-Action Green Lantern Role “A Dream Beyond My Wildest”

“I will tell you, the first 5 minutes of my Superman movie… you remember Pixar’s Up? [The opening was] a sequence with no dialogue that covered that character,” he revealed. “[It] was a set-up, after which you knew exactly what makes Superman tick and exactly what Superman was most afraid of and why Superman made the choices he made. It would have been epic. In five minutes, the scale of the movie would have been absolutely extraordinary.”

In 2018, McQuarrie revealed he met with the first DC Films regime — at the time headed by Warner Bros. executive vice president Jon Berg (Justice League) and DC chief creative officer Geoff Johns (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) — about Green Lantern, which would have been the second feature adaptation after the 2011 film starring Ryan Reynolds as the power ring-wielding Hal Jordan bombed at the box office.

“Green Lantern was what had come to me. And Green Lantern’s a tough one. The power is very challenging, and I cracked it,” McQuarrie told Happy Sad Confused. “It was fun, and watching him learn how to use that power, and giving that power a flaw so that it was not pure invincibility.” (In the comics, the emerald power rings of the Green Lantern Corps are typically weak against the color yellow, but they have another flaw: the rings must be recharged at a power battery before the raw willpower inside is depleted.)

“The whole concept of Green Lantern is the ring has to be recharged, and that’s not a bug — that’s a feature,” he explained. “You only have so much battery life, and that can run out at inconvenient times. That, for me, solved the whole Green Lantern problem. The costume is another thing, and you can figure that out.”

McQuarrie’s concern was “the character, and how do you give that character tension and stakes, and also, how do you do it with Superman?”

“Henry had a take on that, and I suddenly realized how these two characters [Superman and Green Lantern] had amazing similarities, which also allowed for amazing conflict,” he continued. “And an amazing, universe-expanding resolution.”

McQuarrie then likened his Superman/Green Lantern to the epic scope and scale of the action sequences in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. “I hope that anybody who watches this movie, that enjoys the end of this movie, walking away, that’s the feeling I would want you to walk away [with].”

“Because that’s really what Superman is about: it’s about hope, and it’s about being inspiring, and the joy that that character created. I don’t think you need to live in the shadow of [Richard] Donner’s Superman,” he added of the 1978 film starring Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel. “I don’t think you need to live in the shadow of John Williams’ score. But you do need to realize that that movie captured better than any other — with respect to everyone that has followed — it captured better than any other the heart of that character.”

McQuarrie went on to say that “the problem with Superman is that when they constantly are trying to create bigger, and bigger, and bigger obstacles for a character with infinite power. Donner understood, and all the best sequences in Superman understand, that Superman’s greatest obstacle is himself. Followed, potentially, by Green Lantern.”

“It’s all right there, just sitting there, waiting for somebody to make it,” he added. But it won’t be McQuarrie: in 2020, he wrote on social media, “I asked once. I will never ask again.”

The restructured DC Studios, now helmed by James Gunn (The Suicide Squad) and Peter Safran (Aquaman), will launch Gunn’s Superman as the first film in the new DC Universe on July 11. Starring David Corenswet as the Man of Steel, it will also introduce the Guy Gardner Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion). Fillion will first reprise his role in Peacemaker season 2 later this year before returning in HBO’s Lanterns series in 2026 opposite John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler).