‘The Final Reckoning’ Was Originally Very Different

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning took a lot of reckoning with to get to its final version.

On the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Christopher McQuarrie revealed the extent to which the eighth (and possibly final) Mission: Impossible changed during the editing process — namely a lot.

After listening to fans’ feedback about the previous Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning Part One, McQuarrie says he and producer/star Tom Cruise “pivoted and deconstructed [The Final Reckoning]. And I built a nonlinear version of this movie — and shot it to be nonlinear in order to move certain critical scenes earlier in the story.”

But then, McQuarrie continued, “it was very clear as soon as we assembled it it did not work. So Tom said ‘Just make it linear.’ I made it linear; did not work. And when I made it linear, why it did not work was every scene you put first was a scene where they were talking about the Entity before you knew what the Entity was.”

READ MORE: Our Full Review of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning

As a result, McQuarrie added a new cold open reintroducing the Entity — the rogue AI villain of the last two Mission: Impossible films. As for the scene where Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt confronts the Entity, McQuarrie revealed that that sequence was shot “two days” before they “locked picture” on the project.

Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning were conceived together, and originally announced as a single two-part film. After Dead Reckoning underperformed slightly at the box office, and the entire second production was delayed by the Hollywood strikes of 2023, McQuarrie reworked the second half into The Final Reckoning. In the process, scenes originally intended for the second movie got left on the cutting-room floor.

“Everything in the movie you have questions about we shot the s— out of,” McQuarrie explained. That includes the backstory between Ethan Hunt and Esai Morales’ villainous secret agent Gabriel, who supposedly killed a woman who was close to Ethan many years earlier, setting him on his path to join the Impossible Mission Force.

Although the details of Ethan and Gabriel’s history was heavily teased in Dead Reckoning, it never really gets any more attention in The Final Reckoning. McQuarrie now says he “shot a backstory” that “told you a little bit more about their relationship” but that he ultimately felt “unless I made that movie, it’s always going to feel somewhat ambiguous and open-ended anyway. So we just said ‘Screw it.’”

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning is now playing in theaters everywhere.