Admit it; when Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One showed a de-aged Esai Morales in a flashback to establish his beef with Ethan Hunt, you were expecting a de-aged Tom Cruise, weren’t you?
It’s okay to say so, because almost everybody was in the same boat, but co-writer and Christopher McQuarrie mercifully admitted that he always finds the technique so distracting that he can’t find himself focusing on the story being told, so it was thankfully scrapped relatively early on.
That being said, it turns out the filmmaker had an even crazier (and vastly more expensive) thought at one stage, which would have necessitated the already expensive Dead Reckoning Part One to cost a great deal more than the $290 million it already set Paramount back, as he revealed during a podcast appearance with Empire.
“I said, ‘OK, if I were doing this sequence, it would be Tom in, say, 1989. It would be Tony Scott’s Mission: Impossible. That’s who would have been directing the movie before Brian De Palma, you know, in that era. We looked at Days of Thunder and we looked at the style of it, and we started thinking what would it look like if Tony Scott had shot this, and who would it have been? I looked back at who was the ingenue, who was the breakout star in 1989? And right around then was Mystic Pizza. And I was like, ‘Oh my God. Julia Roberts, a then-pre-Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, as this young woman.’
The only way I could have seen doing the sequence justice was to somehow convince Julia Roberts to come in and be this small role at the beginning of this story. And of course, as you’re conceptually going through it, you’re like, ‘Now all anybody’s going to be doing is thinking about the de-aging of Julia Roberts, and Esai, and Tom, and Henry Czerny.’ I got the bill for de-aging those people before their salaries were even factored into it.
And if you put two of them in a shot together, or three of them in a shot together, it would have been as expensive as the train by the time we were done. It was so … the force multiplier of — and the way we shoot scenes, and the fluidity, and the camera movement. And of course, that wouldn’t be the style of the movie in 1989. That wouldn’t make sense if you were shooting an ’89 Mission like a 2023 Mission.”
Like McQuarrie said, that’s an awful lot of money to spend for the sake of a gimmick, and we can count our lucky stars that cooler heads prevailed and Mission: Impossible 7 didn’t go all-in on the de-aging fad.