Recent projections about Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One eyeing a potentially franchise-best box office opening certainly have cast and crew grinning ear-to-ear. And one person who’s excited about this prospect is director Christopher McQuarrie. The franchise has carved out a nice niche for itself under his stewardship. Regardless, he can’t field comparisons with other popular action movie franchises along the likes of James Bond, John Wick or even last year’s Top Gun: Maverick.
When quizzed about a response, McQuarrie refuses to see themselves competing with any of these franchises, expressing his admiration for those movies while emphasizing towards doing their own thing and bettering themselves with each movie.
We don’t see ourselves in competition with Bond or John Wick. We love those movies, and we admire those filmmakers, and we want to see those guys win. All we’re really doing is competing with ourselves.
The comparisons with Top Gun: Maverick in particular are interesting though. For one, it’s not really an action movie or a franchise that falls in the same genre; one could argue whether it’s a franchise at all. Regardless, it’s impressive box-office run is so fresh on everyone’s minds that some trades are almost referring to Dead Reckoning as a spiritual successor to Maverick, a CruiseVerse if you will (there, I just coined that term).
So what does McQuarrie think about comparisons to this particular movie? He’s ready to bury and crush Maverick to the ground.
And coming away from Top Gun, we looked at that movie, and said, ‘We’re going to bury those guys. We’re going to crush Top Gun.’ That’s how we look at it. Our only rivals are ourselves. You’ll see things in Part Two that benefit entirely from everything we learned from Maverick.
One interesting bit from that quote is how even learnings from Top Gun: Maverick feed into the Mission: Impossible movies. Those learnings in turn could feed into Top Gun 3, if and when it happens.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is set to release in theaters on July 12, 2023. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the film sees Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby and Henry Czerny reprise their roles from previous films in the series. They are joined by series newcomers Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, Charles Parnell, Rob Delaney, Indira Varma and Mark Gatiss.
