Last month, I posted a positive test-screening reaction for ‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning’ which was said to be a 3-hour cut.
“INCREDIBLE. Nerve-jangling. A lot of cliff jumping. Steep mountain riding. “Tom Cruise is certifiably nuts,” one person told me.
Now we have Bob Bakish, president of Paramount, revealing that he’s not down with the 180 minute cut of the film:
“I haven’t seen all of ‘MI:7,’ but I’ve seen a bunch of it. We actually just did the first test screening for an audience last week, and the audience lost their mind. And it’s still too long, they’ve got to cut it. But the movie is insane. It’s like a complete thrill ride. And Tom, he’s very good.”
Christopher McQuarrie is back directing this one, but if he and Cruise believe this 3-hour cut is the bees knees, then, of course, they shouldn’t snip a single damn frame.
There have been constant delays in relation to ‘Dead Reckoning,’ especially due to the pandemic’s effect on global supply-chain, production workers and locations.
The film started shooting in Italy on February 2020, but it had to stop and start production seven different times since then. Notice the location, Italy, that was the epicentre of COVID during the early months of the pandemic. Terrible luck.
In contrast, the most recent film in the series, 2018’s “Mission: Impossible — Fallout,” cost $190 million to make. This one had its budget balloon to $290 million.
The end result is that M:I7 has been delayed to summer 2023 because the film ends on a cliff-hanger, and Tom Cruise wanted to finish making the 8th film before releasing the 7th. The plan is to have both films serve as a sendoff for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character.