Christopher McQuarrie’s “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two” is currently in production ahead of ‘Part One’ arriving in cinemas next Summer.
The films are a two-part story, but at one time the first part had a different title. McQuarrie, speaking on the acclaimed Light the Fuse podcast recently alongside star Tom Cruise, revealed the reasoning behind both the ‘Dead Reckoning’ title and why it was decided to turn it into a ‘Part 1 & Part 2’ style deal. He begins:
“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. 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.”
McQuarrie goes on to say that by the time the first film is over, the original title for the film would not have worked as well. Instead, they landed on Dead Reckoning and then tried to figure out how that would work over the course of two films:
“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 … 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” opens July 14th 2023 with the second part arriving June 28th 2024.
Source: Action Newz
