Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible 7 Being Majorly Cut Down By Studio Boss?
The President of Paramount says that Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is too long and will have to be cut down.
Led by Tom Cruise, the highly anticipated seventh installment of Mission: Impossible has started test screenings with audiences. But while viewers loved the action-packed spy adventure, the studio says the movie is much too long. The revelation was made by the President of Paramount Global, Bob Bakish, during the 2023 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, & Telecom Conference.
“I haven’t seen all of MI: 7, but I’ve seen a bunch of it,” he said via Word of Reel. “It’s still too long [so] they’ve got to cut it. But the movie is insane. It’s like a complete thrill ride. And Tom [Cruise], he’s very good,” Bakish added about the Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One screening. The last entry in the franchise was 147 minutes, which means the upcoming film surpasses that.
Fortunately, there’s still time for the creative team to edit the Tom Cruise movie, as it only hits theaters on July 14. Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, plot details remain a closely guarded secret. But the story will be told over the next two films, bringing Ethan Hunt’s saga to an end. The final mission will see the secret agent go back to the beginning in an epic emotional journey.
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) was last seen tracking down missing plutonium after a botched job. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will reunite its headline star with Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Frederick Schmidt, and Vanessa Kirby, who will reprise their roles from the previous films.
A few new cast members are set to join Tom Cruise in the new Mission: Impossible film. This includes Hayley Atwell, whose character Grace has been described as “a destructive force of nature” by the film’s director during an appearance on the Light the Fuse podcast. At the time, the Marvel alum revealed that the loyalties of her character are somewhat ambiguous.
The supporting cast also includes Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, Esai Morales, Rob Delaney, Charles Parnell, Indira Varma, Mark Gatiss, and Cary Elwes. Meanwhile, Nick Offerman and Janet McTeer recently joined the cast of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two. While both roles remain undisclosed, the former will be playing a character called Sydney in the Tom Cruise movie.
While both movies are set to become box office hits, the production process hasn’t been easy. Dead Reckoning Part One was plagued by pandemic-related delays. It eventually wrapped in September 2021. Tom Cruise allegedly took legal action, forcing the studio to give the action film an exclusive theatrical release and drop a proposed streaming launch after 45 days.
The move is perfectly understandable since the Tom Cruise-led Mission: Impossible franchise has been financially lucrative for Paramount. Released in 2018, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is the highest-grossing film in the series, earning $791.6 million worldwide. In its entirety, the franchise has grossed over $3.5 billion.
“The M: I series really does represent the pinnacle of filmmaking excellence,” Paramount President Brian Robbins told the crowd at Cinema Con 2022. “And we have no doubt that this new picture will set the bar even higher,” he added about the Tom Cruise movies.
