Xtreme Vogue London Desk: Sarah Marshal
The seventh instalment to the ‘Mission Impossible’ franchise, ‘Dead Reckoning Part One’ has been a major success, full of action and many twists. However, director Christopher McQuarrie said that ‘MI7’ was a topic of great concern for Tom Cruise and had completely refused the possibility of a cliffhanger ending, with the actor even losing sleep over it, which led to them constantly refining it.
As reported by Variety, in an interview with Total Film, talking about the film’s train sequence, the director said: “Where we ended the movie was always where we were going to end it.”
“How we ended the movie was a big, big mystery for us. It kept Tom awake at night throughout production. He would come in all the time and say, ‘This can’t be a cliffhanger, it’s got to be satisfying’. The audience has to feel a sense of completion.”
McQuarrie continued, “Tom kept looking at that scene, and he had all this anxiety about whether or not it would be a satisfying conclusion or whether it would feel open-ended. We constantly revisited it, constantly refined it.”
“If you leave it with a cliffhanger, it feels a little bit like we’re expecting you to come back,” McQuarrie told Total Film.
“We didn’t want that feeling. The feeling we were reaching for – and we hope you feel – is we dare you not to come back. We want to leave you thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see what happens next’,” he added.
Unlike other recent Hollywood blockbusters, such as ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse‘ which left audiences on a massive cliffhanger which many found unsatisfying, ‘Dead Reckoning Part One’ aimed to offer a more definitive conclusion and sought to tie up any loose ends in ‘Dead Reckoning Part Two’.
