Mission: Impossible Director Explains Why Dead Reckoning Is in Two Parts

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is hitting theaters next month, and it marks the third film in the franchise to be helmed by Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie was the first director to take on more than one film in the series, and the newest is expected to have some of the biggest thrills yet. It was previously announced that the film would be split into two parts, but it might be a while before fans see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two due to the current writers’ strike. During a recent 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 Does “Dead Reckoning” Mean? 

McQuarrie previously spoke about the meaning behind the “Dead Reckoning”, which was revealed during last year’s CinemaCon.

“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 told  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.”

He continued, “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? 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.”

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One hits theaters on July 12th.