Original Mission: Impossible Director Doesn’t Think It Needed Sequels

Based on having crafted films like Carrie, Scarface, or The Untouchables, director Brian De Palma might not have been the first name audiences thought of when it came to adapting the Mission: Impossible TV series into a film, though his success with the 1996 debut film has earned the series five sequels so far, even though he doesn’t think there needed to be more than one entry. The filmmaker has largely made original films throughout his career, covering a wide variety of genres, with the director himself pointing out that making sequels earns a filmmaker money, but that is never his intent with his projects.

“Stories, they keep making them longer and longer only for economic reasons,” De Palma shared with AP News. “After I made Mission: Impossible, Tom [Cruise] asked me to start working on the next one. I said: ‘Are you kidding?’ One of these is enough. Why would anybody want to make another one? Of course, the reason they make another one is to make money. I was never a movie director to make money, which is the big problem of Hollywood. That’s the corruption of Hollywood.”

While the first two sequels to the original film were somewhat successful, it wasn’t until Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol in 2011 that the franchise was really revived, with follow-up films Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Mission: Impossible – Fallout going on to become some of the most successful films in their years of release.

Despite De Palma admitting that he had no interest in crafting a second film into the franchise, the filmmaker remembers that point in his career fondly, even admitting that he felt he was at the height of his popularity in the ’90s.

“In my mid-50s doing Carlito’s Way and then Mission: Impossible,” De Palma confirmed of his peak. “It doesn’t get much better than that. You have all the power and tools at your disposal. When you have the Hollywood system working for you, you can do some remarkable things. But as your movies become less successful, it gets harder to hold on to the power and you have to start making compromises. I don’t know if you even realize you’re making them… I tend to be very hard-nosed about this. If you have a couple of good decades, that’s good, that’s great.”

Mission: Impossible 7 is set to land in theaters on July 23, 2021 while Mission: Impossible 8 is set to debut on August 25, 2022.

Do you wish De Palma directed a sequel in the series? Let us know in the comments below!