Mission: Impossible Director Teases "Epic" Two-Part Franchise Finale

After entertaining fans for nearly three decades, the Mission: Impossible franchise is poised to come to a conclusion in the coming years, with a two-part finale playing out across the saga's seventh and eighth films. The finale will begin with Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, which already has drawn a lot of excitement from fans even though it won't debut in theaters until the summer of 2023. In a recent interview with Empire Magazine, Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie teased what the next two films have in store, as well as exactly what the subtitle means.

"There are many things emerging from Ethan's past," McQuarrie explained. "'Dead reckoning' is a navigational term. It means you're picking a course based solely on your last known position and that becomes quite the metaphor not only for Ethan, but several characters." 

"The first thing we knew was that if it's gonna be a big two-part adventure, it's got to be epic," McQuarrie added. "It's going to have to be the installment that swallows the rest of the franchise whole. There's just not another way to do it." 

What is Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One about?

Plot details for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One are currently unknown at this time. The cast will include Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Hayley Atwell, Shea Whigham, Marcin Dorocinski, Pom Klementieff, Esai Morales, Rob Delaney, Henry Czerny, and Cary Elwes.

"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 explained in a previous interview with 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. 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?" McQuarrie continued. "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. 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."

Are you excited for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One will be released in theaters on July 14, 2023.