'Mission: Impossible' director nearly de-aged Tom Cruise in the original 'Dead Reckoning' opening, but thought it'd be too distracting
- "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning" almost de-aged Tom Cruise for a scene in the sequel.
- Director Christopher McQuarrie said a young Cruise nearly appeared in the film's original opening.
Tom Cruise has been playing superspy Ethan Hunt in the "Mission: Impossible" movies for over 25 years, and the most recent sequel – "Dead Reckoning Part One" – almost rolled back the clock in a flashback to before audiences first met the hero in 1996.
The 2023 movie follows Hunt as he battles a mysterious figure from his past, known only as Gabriel (Esai Morales), who has aligned himself with a powerful artificial intelligence that has become sentient and threatens to topple the entire world.
Director Christopher McQuarrie recently told GamesRadar that the film almost started with a flashback, and he'd wanted to de-age Cruise for the scene.
"Originally, there had been a whole sequence at the beginning of the movie that was going to take place in 1989," McQuarrie said. "We talked about it as a cold open. We talked about it as flashbacks in the movie. We looked at de-aging."
Audiences recently saw something similar in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," which opened with a 1940s-era set piece with a de-aged Harrison Ford fighting Nazis as a much-younger Indy. However, McQuarrie explained that while looking at other examples of de-aging, he stopped watching whatever film it was used in.
McQuarrie said: "One of the big things about [the de-aging] I was looking at while researching, I kept saying, 'Boy, this de-aging is really good' or 'This de-aging is not so good.' Never did I find myself actually following the story."
"I was so distracted by an actor that I had known for however long was now suddenly this young person," he added.
The director also didn't rule out the prospect of using de-aging technology on Cruise in a future movie, saying: "I cracked the code – I think – on how best to approach it. By then, we had kind of moved away from it. We may still play with it. We never say never."
Perhaps "Dead Reckoning Part Two" will show audiences how a young Hunt met Gabriel when the sequel eventually arrives in theaters in 2024.