Well, I really didn’t see this coming. Fallout must have been a bigger success than I had thought. Tom Cruise has announced that there will be two more outings for his Mission Impossible franchise, and that they will be shot back to back for release in summers 2021 and 2022. Not only that, but Ghost Recon Protocol, no sorry, try again– Rogue Nation and Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie has revealed that he has signed up (presumably to both write and direct) both films.
As Fallout was my favourite film of last year this is very welcome news. I’m not sure where this leaves Bond exactly, with that franchise stuttering and floundering, finally rush-releasing (if you can call it that, after a five-year break) Bond 25 next year, with shooting to yet start. This film that will be Daniel Craig’s last outing as Bond, meaning another reboot (or at least the usual casting the next Bond hysterical nonsense) beyond that. In comparison, the MI series seems to be sailing on to bigger and better things, with a creative team confidently in charge.
I assume making two MI films together will enable a really epic, two-part narrative that may very likely complete the Ethan Hunt saga (can’t imagine even the apparently indestructible Tom Cruise has too many more of those physical stunt-ridden projects ahead of him). Mind, after all the hyperbolics of Fallout, how I would dearly love to be in on the thought-processes involved in somehow topping that film. I’d actually like to see them reign it all in and make the films low-key and more intimate, but this is blockbuster territory so that’s out the window. Maybe some villain is going to threaten to pull the moon down onto America and Hunt has to go up there into space and save the world from Lunar orbit? At this point, not even the sky’s the limit anymore, is it?
the ghost of 82 
Ghost Recon? Did you mean Ghost Protocol? Or Rogue Nation 😉
Thanks for the catch, I was tired after a long day which is the only excuse I have for slipping that mistake into my post. All these films/sequels, it’s so easy to get confused- not helped by me always confusing Ghost Protocol with Ghost Recon, the old xbox game I used to adore many moons ago. I don’t know- I’m getting old I guess. Doesn’t bode well for me in twenty years time….
But I’m really intrigued by them doing two back-to-back. Having listened to the Empire podcast interviews with McQuarrie about both Rogue Nation and Fallout, and read a lot of his Q&As on Twitter, it’s clear how damn hard these films are to make — not just the literal logistics, but coming up with fresh ideas — and he sounded genuinely uncertain about going through it all for a third time. So not only to agree to two more, but to make them at the same time… crikey. And the 2021/2022 release dates suggest it’ll be some kind of two-parter, which is a huge divergence for M:I as a franchise. Very interesting…
(I used a YouTube link that should’ve made it jump straight to the chorus, but it doesn’t seem to have worked! Way to kill a gag, WordPress. Hey-ho.)
Yeah, I imagined they might risk another MI film together, but two… I mean, they wouldn’t go make another without a great idea, and Fallout doesn’t necessarily lead to another the way Rogue Nation did, as several of the characters and storylines are surely done now (which was one of the positives of Fallout, that sense of closure). The only negative is that two films infers one longer story-arc which saddles the first film with being exposition with little pay-off and the second being all pay-off, and neither being a ‘proper’ movie. We’ll see I guess…
I really hope that, because it’s McQuarrie (who’s great at story and audience expectations), the two film thing will work. I hope he’s got an idea for it that requires two films, rather than it being Paramount going, “Cruise can’t do this forever; let’s make two at once to maximise potential”. Two films that are complete stories individually, but also very much connected in some way, would be my preference… almost like what they did with Rogue Nation and Fallout, in fact.