Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One's Ending Kept Tom Cruise "Awake at Night Throughout Production"

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is now playing in theaters, and it's heading towards a $240 million global opening at the box office. Fans of the franchise are already eager to learn more about the upcoming Part Two, which is currently on pause due to the WGA and SAG strikes. While the seventh installment does set up a lot for the eighth movie, it doesn't end on a huge cliffhanger like some other recent films. In fact, Tom Cruise was adamant that the film have a satisfying ending. Director Christopher McQuarrie recently spoke to Games Radar about the film, and talked about the decision to end Part One the way they did.

"Where we ended the movie was always where we were going to end it," McQuarrie said of the movie's train sequence. "How we ended the movie was a big, big mystery for us. It kept Tom awake at night throughout production. He would come in all the time and say, 'This can't be a cliffhanger, it's got to be satisfying.' The audience has to feel a sense of completion." He added, "Tom kept looking at that scene and he had all this anxiety about whether or not it would be a satisfying conclusion or whether it would feel open-ended. We constantly revisited it, constantly refined it."

"If you leave it with a cliffhanger, it feels a little bit like we're expecting you to come back," McQuarrie explained. "We didn't want that feeling. The feeling we were reaching for – and we hope you feel – is we dare you not to come back. We want to leave you thinking, 'Oh, I can't wait to see what happens next.'"

Why Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning in Two Parts? 

During an interview with Collider, McQuarrie explained why Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning has been split into two parts.

"Well, we knew with Fallout. Fallout really grew because of all the character and emotion we were putting into the story, all the things that we had discovered in Rogue Nation that was so unexpected," McQuarrie shared. "I knew I wanted to expand the cast, and I knew I wanted to give each one of those characters more to do, so I knew the movie was going to be bigger and longer than Fallout."

"And at which point I said, 'Why are we fighting this? Why are we going to try to jam this into two hours? Let's just break it in half and make it two movies.' That really was the rationale behind it being a two-part movie. It just it wasn't just that the story was bigger but that we wanted more emotion in the movie," he added. 

"Yeah, it's massive, and it was complicated by the fact that certain things in Part Two required stopping Part One to shoot them, whether it was because of weather or actor availability. And so, with all the other challenges that were confronting this movie while we were making it, there was the challenge of stopping in the middle, not even knowing what the full movie was, and trying to predict what it was in the second film. It's a testament to how great this team is and how patient this cast is. It's really something," McQuarrie explained. 

What Is Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning About?

Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which premieres in theaters on July 12th. It's the beginning of the end for the action-packed franchise, as Cruise reteams with longtime collaborator and filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie for more death-defying and breathtaking stunts. Hunt and allies Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) attempt to track down a new weapon with the power to tear the world apart. Actors Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, and Esai Morales join the cast for the latest installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, which is set to wrap up with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two.