Tom Cruise has teamed up with some awesome directors while making the Mission: Impossible films. He dangled from a ceiling for Brian De Palma, participated in John Woo-style gunfights, got put through the wringer by JJ Abrams, climbed the Burj Khalifa for Brad Bird, and has gone on several death-defying adventures with Christopher McQuarrie. But other directors have crafted Mission: Impossible stories that have never made it to the screen, including Oliver Stone, David Fincher, and Joe Carnahan. And we’re going to try to dig up as much information on those missions as we can in this episode of What Happened to This Unmade Movie?
At the start of the 1960s, James Bond 007 became a worldwide sensation – and a lot of movies and TV shows were created to try to cash in on the enhanced popularity of the spy business. In 1966, Bruce Geller came up with an idea for his own spy show, and it’s a rare case where a Bond successor is still alive, popular, and successful to this day. For seven seasons, Geller’s Mission: Impossible followed agents in the Impossible Missions Force as they went on their supposedly impossible missions. And that’s all there was to the show. Geller didn’t want to dig into the personal lives of the spies or give details on IMF. Each episode would simply show the lead agent getting the mission details, gathering the team required to pull it off, and then getting it done. All we would know about the IMF agents is how good they are at their job. The series was revived for a two season run at the end of the ‘80s. Then in the ‘90s, Paramount Pictures turned to Tom Cruise to star in and produce a film version of the concept.
Cruise started developing Mission: Impossible with Three Days of the Condor director Sydney Pollack, who he had just worked with on The Firm. But soon the directing job went to Brian De Palma, the guy who brought us films like Carrie, Blow Out, Scarface, and The Untouchables. Working from a script by Jurassic Park’s David Koepp, Chinatown’s Robert Towne, and Schindler’s List’s Steven Zaillian, he delivered a thrilling espionage flick about double crosses, an internal mole hunt at IMF, and a list of spies’ true identities. There were some complaints that the story was too confusing, and some fans were understandably upset about the way legacy character Jim Phelps was handled, but the movie was a hit, opening the door to a series of sequels. De Palma was asked to return for Mission: Impossible 2, but he declined the offer. He didn’t want to repeat himself by making a sequel. And that’s how the idea came about that Mission: Impossible could be a director’s showcase series. Different directors could come in and put their stamp on the series by making an entry in their own style. So Cruise asked his Born on the Fourth of July director Oliver Stone to take over for Mission: Impossible 2. Stone signed on in February of 1997, just months after the release of the first film. He was quoted as saying his Mission would be “a combination of action, suspense, and philosophy for the 21st century… a very cutting-edge film” that would “say something about the state of corporate culture, technology, and global politics.”
Future Enemy of the State writer David Marconi wrote the initial drafts of the script, with The Player’s Michael Tolkin providing some revisions. And thanks to the hosts of the podcast Light the Fuse, we actually know quite a bit about Stone’s Mission: Impossible 2. This one would have seen Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt – a master of both disguise and acrobatic insanity – taking on a sentient supercomputer, which may have been called either the Linear Consciousness Accelerator, the Mind/Body Transfer Station, or the Evolution Room. After dethroning a dictator in the opening sequence, Ethan and his IMF team would be tasked with rescuing a theoretical mathematician from a prison in China. They succeed in doing that and get the guy into Vietnam. Then he kills himself. Ethan discovers that IMF had never actually sent him on this mission. He had been tricked into doing it by this supercomputer and its owner, a villain described as being a mix of Bill Gates and Ted Kaczynski. Now the villain needs information that Ethan got from the mathematician. To extract this info, he captures Ethan and straps him to a chair that allows the computer to access his memories. And the second half of the story takes place largely within Ethan’s subconscious as the computer creates different virtual realities to try to trick him into revealing what he knows. Ethan fights back with his mental will power and is eventually able to confront the A.I. at the heart of the computer. He does so in the Garden of Eden, where the A.I. first presents itself as the multi-ethnic Child of the New Millennium. Then morphs into a monster. You can see why it was decided that this script didn’t work, even though it would have featured some interesting action sequences. Like a car chase through a hillside shanty town, reminiscent of Police Story; a sequence where the computer takes control of the Denver airport, which might have had action fans flashing back to Die Hard 2; and a scene involving a mirror wall moving down a hallway, which ended up in the fourth Mission: Impossible film. There was also a moment where a bad guy has an Ethan Hunt mask forced onto him so he’ll be mistakenly killed by his own associates. That’s an idea that was used in the final version of M:I 2.
Star Trek writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga were brought on to rework the script in January of ‘98, which is about the time Stone stepped away and the supercomputer story was set aside. Cruise met with Chungking Express director Wong Kar Wai about the film the following month, but ended up hiring The Killer, Hard Boiled, and Face/Off director John Woo instead. Moore and Braga came up with the action-heavy story of Ethan Hunt battling a traitorous IMF agent to stop a virus from getting out into the world, and Robert Towne handled the revisions. Mission: Impossible 2 is generally seen as a lesser entry in the franchise, but it was another huge hit in the summer of 2000.
In early 2001, it was rumored that Ang Lee – fresh off making Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – was being considered to direct Mission: Impossible 3. Apparently Field of Dreams and Sneakers director Phil Alden Robinson was in the running as well, but he ended up making The Sum of All Fears for Paramount instead. Around this time, Ben Trebilcook was working on a version of the script that would have been a prequel so Emilio Estevez could return as his ill-fated character from the first move. The story dealt with the destruction of the Wonders of the World… But that idea was shelved when 9/11 happened.
In April of 2002, it was announced that Seven and Fight Club director David Fincher would be directing the third Mission. As you would expect with Fincher at the helm, this one was going dark. The director said he had a really cool and violent idea for the film that would deal with the black market trade of human organs in Africa. He said, “You can never make exactly the movie you want to make. But if the studio lets us do even half of what we want, it should make for a pretty interesting film.” Robert Towne and Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life writer Dean Georgaris worked on the script. Filming locations were scouted in South Africa. It has been rumored that Sylvester Stallone could have been up for the villain role. But in the end, Cruise decided not to move forward with Fincher’s vision for Mission: Impossible 3. He has said that it would have been too different for the franchise, as Fincher wasn’t embracing the elements that movie-goers want to see from a Mission movie.
Fincher told MTV, “The problem with third movies is the people who are financing them are experts on how they should be made and what they should be. At that point, when you own a franchise like that, you want to get rid of any extraneous opinions. I’m not the kind of person who says, ‘Let’s see the last two, I see what you’re going for.’ You’ll never hear me say, ‘Whatever is easiest for you.’” So Fincher moved on. And in February of 2003, it was announced that Joe Carnahan would be directing Mission: Impossible 3. Cruise had just helped his crime thriller Narc get Paramount distribution, and now the director was determined to deliver the most ragged and realistic Mission yet.
Carnahan wasn’t a fan of Mission: Impossible 2, feeling it had come off as a parody of spy movies. He described his vision as “punk rock” and an action version of ‘70s paranoia thrillers like Marathon Man. For over a year, he worked with future Nightcrawler director Dan Gilroy on the script. Little has leaked about the specifics, but the story was, like Fincher’s idea, set in Africa. It dealt with private militaries and links between arms sales in the States, the Baltic, and the African West. The opening scene would have shown someone carrying out an assassination with a sniper rifle. While the assassin was leaving the scene, they’d remove their face, revealing it was Ethan Hunt, wearing a mask.
In April of 2004, casting announcements started being made. Kenneth Branagh would play a villain based on Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Carrie-Anne Moss would play an Impossible Missions Force agent named Leah Quint. Scarlett Johansson was cast as a new IMF recruit, the protégé of Ethan Hunt. Moss and Johansson jumped right into stunt training with Cruise, who was also preparing for a sequence involving a motorcycle. Locations were scouted in Ghana. The production was given tentative permission to shoot inside the Reichstag building in Berlin. But there were major problems behind the scenes.
Carnahan thought the Gilroy script was perfect, then Towne did a rewrite that everyone was happy with. Everyone except for the director. He told Grantland he thought the Towne rewrite was “bad and uninspiring” and just more of the same from part 2. Filming was scheduled to begin in August of 2004. With three months to go before the start date, The Shawshank Redemption’s Frank Darabont was brought on to do another rewrite. Two months later, Carnahan decided to leave the project… but Darabont was very positive about the work he was doing on the script. He told Empire, “This is going into a very character-driven and gritty – much grittier than the first two – kind of place. Dealing in a more immediately graspable and relevant reality, globally speaking. It’s much more in line with certain things that are going on in the headlines.” Darabont wasn’t interested in directing the film himself. But whoever ended up directing it, he was sure the movie was going to “just kick the ass of the first two.”
Cruise had been binge-watching the spy TV series Alias, so he decided to hire the show’s creator JJ Abrams to direct Mission: Impossible 3. Abrams signed on in August of 2004, the same month filming was supposed to start. But he wanted to rework the story to fit his own vision, so production was delayed a year. Darabont was let go so Abrams could start fresh and write the script with Alias writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. Darabont stopped taking writer-for-hire jobs after this. Now he only writes scripts he intends to direct himself, because the experience of having scripts he wrote for both Mission: Impossible 3 and Indiana Jones 4 get scrapped was too painful. In May of 2005, it was confirmed that Branagh, Moss, and Johansson had all dropped out of the cast. Abrams told About.com, “The script was rewritten. I’m a huge fan of each actor that they cast originally, but to have kept the actors when we are reinventing the story would have been an odd process. To say, ‘Write a script with these people in mind for characters that haven’t been written,’ just felt like we had to start over with a clean slate.”
For their Mission, Abrams, Kurtzman, and Orci broke Bruce Geller’s rule for the original series by telling a story that deals with Ethan Hunt’s personal life in a major way. But the rule-breaking was worth it, because his personal life is nearly destroyed by the best villain in the franchise, Philip Seymour Hoffman as black market trafficker Owen Davian. Davian’s illegal profession may be an echo of elements from the Fincher and Carnahan versions of the story, and the idea for a sequence where Ethan tries to rescue his protégé and she ends up dying in the process was straight from Carnahan.
None of the films have had the style and tone Carnahan was going for, but they have used ideas that came up while he was involved with the franchise. For example, the entire IMF gets disavowed in Ghost Protocol – but that was originally going to happen in Carnahan’s movie. He has said that ideas from the script he oversaw ended up being spread throughout Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and the final version of part 3. And he wasn’t too impressed by the Abrams film, saying his version would have been better because it was based in reality and had social importance. He also said his film would have had the two best mask reveals in the history of the franchise. But we didn’t get to see those.
Abrams stuck with the franchise as a producer for a few installments after part 3. When the time came for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, he brought on two more Alias writers to work on the script, Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec. Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer and Shaun of the Dead’s Edgar Wright were considered for the directing job. But it ended up going to Brad Bird, who was known for his work in animation on the likes of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille and was ready to make his live-action debut. The script for Ghost Protocol – which is about Ethan going above and beyond to prevent a nuclear apocalypse – received some uncredited revisions from Christopher McQuarrie, who had previously written for Cruise on the World War II film Valkyrie. And with McQuarrie, Cruise had found one of his greatest collaborators.
McQuarrie went on to direct Cruise in Jack Reacher – and after that film, he was offered the chance to direct the fifth Mission: Impossible. He took it. And since McQuarrie took the helm, it has been smooth sailing for the franchise. Cruise worked with a lot of different directors trying to get the first four movies made. Now McQuarrie has directed four Mission: Impossibles himself. Clearly he’s someone who’s interested in telling exciting stories about the Impossible Missions Force while still including all of the elements movie-goers have come to expect from this series. That’s exactly the sort of director Cruise was looking for all along.
The McQuarrie run has been awesome. He has had Ethan take down a terrorist organization, stop the nuclear apocalypse (again), and – decades after the Oliver Stone script for M:I 2 – try to thwart a powerful A.I. system. But as good as these movies have been, it’s difficult not to wish we could get a peek into an alternative universe. One where we did get Mission: Impossible movies from the likes of Oliver Stone, David Fincher, Joe Carnahan, and others… just to see how they would have turned out.