The original director of the 1996 Mission: Impossible movie, Brian De Palma, doesn’t think the successful and highly popular action franchise needed sequels.
In an interview with AP News, De Palma pointed out that making sequel after sequel earns a filmmaker money, but as a director whose career was built on original films, that was never his intent with any of his projects.
“Stories, they keep making them longer and longer only for economic reasons,” De Palma said. “After I made Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise asked me to start working on the next one. I said: ‘Are you kidding?’ One of these is enough. Why would anybody want to make another one? Of course, the reason they make another one is to make money. I was never a movie director to make money, which is the big problem of Hollywood. That’s the corruption of Hollywood.”
The 1996 debut film has spawned the series five sequels so far including John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2 and J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III. However, the franchise didn’t reach its peak until its revival with 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and the Christopher McQuarrie directed follow-up films Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
While De Palma admits he had no interest in directing a sequel, the director continued to explain how he remembers that time fondly because he felt he was at the pinnacle of his career during the 1990s.
“In my mid-50s doing Carlito’s Way and then Mission: Impossible,” De Palma continued, “It doesn’t get much better than that. You have all the power and tools at your disposal. When you have the Hollywood system working for you, you can do some remarkable things. But as your movies become less successful, it gets harder to hold on to the power and you have to start making compromises. I don’t know if you even realize you’re making them… I tend to be very hard-nosed about this. If you have a couple of good decades, that’s good, that’s great.”
Although current events have halted production for the foreseeable future, Christopher McQuarrie is directing Mission: Impossible 7 and Mission: Impossible 8 back-to-back and the movies are currently slated for release on 23rd July 2021 and 25th August 2022 respectively.
Do you agree with Brian De Palma that the Mission: Impossible franchise didn’t need sequels? Let us know in the comments below or tweet us @flickeringmyth…
