‘Let’s just say that the studio and Tom were in a disagreement’: Not even ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning’ is immune from Hollywood politics

Thanks partly to the pandemic causing the shoot to stretch on for well over two years from beginning to end, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is comfortably one of the most expensive movies of all-time with a budget that’s rumored to be pushing $300 million all told.

When you factor in the additional costs of Part Two – which will no doubt be roughly the same – then it’s a massive financial gamble on Paramount’s part, regardless of leading man and producer Tom Cruise’s immense A-list star power, especially when the opening chapter is already beginning to fall off at the box office in the face of Barbenheimer.

Given that he’s been at the top of the industry tree for nearly 40 years, you’d think Cruise would be able to do whatever he wants whenever he wants, for however much it needs to cost. However, Paramount CEO Brian Robbins revealed to Variety that things got prickly behind the scenes on Part One, with his outfit having to absorb the additional costs due to co-financier Skydance having a contract that stipulated it couldn’t go beyond $240 million.

“Let’s just say that the studio and the production and Tom were in a disagreement over direction, and there was a stalemate going on. We had to hit the pause button. They were stuck on how they were going to move forward with Dead Reckoning Part Two while finishing Part One. It was a production issue, and it was about the scope of what was being asked for. And the question we needed to ask was do we need this and why? And then how big is it going to be, and how long is that going to take?” 

When you’re Tom Cruise, the answer to “how big is it going to be” is always going to be “as big as possible,” but as of yet we’ve yet to hear of Paramount getting its fingers a little too grubby interfering on the Mission: Impossible two-parter, but there’s still a while to go until the grand finale arrives.