“Mission Impossible 7” filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie said he decided to break up the next movie into two parts because he wants the film to “have more feeling across the board.”
“We’re going to take this opportunity to make the movie better in prep than we’ve ever had a chance to do before,” McQuarrie shared during his appearance on the “Light the Fuse” podcast on its 100th episode. The comments were noted by the Hollywood Reporter in a piece published Wednesday. (RELATED: Tom Cruise Apparently Hurt During Filming Of ‘M:I-6’ In London [VIDEO])
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He then explained the reason for dividing the next movie into two was because it ended up feeling too long, at 2 hours and 40 minutes. (RELATED: REPORT: Coachella Potentially Rescheduled To October Due To Coronavirus Fears)
“When we went into making Fallout, I said to Tom [Cruise], ‘I really want to make this more of an emotional journey for [Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt],'” McQuarrie explained. “Going into this, I said, ‘I want to take what we learned from Fallout and apply it to every character in the movie.”
“I want everyone to have an emotional arc. … I just want the movie to have more feeling across the board,” he added. We realized we had a movie that was two hours, 40 minutes long. And every scene in it was necessary.”
The filmmaker continued, while he explained, when he cut two segments in the movie, “the ending of the first movie snapped into place.”
“We knew what the ending was and we knew what the beginning was,” McQuarrie said. “And now I had these two sequences, which means, I’ve got 40 minutes of Mission: Impossible 8 figured out.”
Christopher also confirmed some of the stars that will be returning to the Tom Cruise-led franchise, including Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby.
And he said one star they are hoping will come on board is going to be a “casting coup.”
“There is someone we were talking to before the world blew up,” McQuarrie shared. “An actor I was very excited about. I don’t know where that is, because we had talked days before [the shutdown] and it was an incredibly exciting casting coup.”
And as if fans needed more of a reason to get excited, McQuarrie said that “any character, dead or alive, is fair game to return.”
“M:I 7” was days away from shooting in Venice when production shut down due to the coronavirus. The crew then relocated to Rome, where that was subsequently shut down due to the pandemic.
“Mission Impossible 7” is set to hit theaters Nov. 19, 2021.