‘Never did I find myself actually following the story’: ‘Mission: Impossible 7’ mercifully avoided jumping on Hollywood’s worst bandwagon

Light spoilers that won’t ruin Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One to follow.

As soon as audiences clapped eyes on Esai Morales’ youthful visage during a sequence in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning set 30 years ago, everyone was expecting something to happen that never did.

The villain of the piece had been de-aged as part of a flashback, so it was inevitable to assume that Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt would have been given the same treatment. After all, digital de-aging is all the rage these days and was very recently pivotal to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, so it wouldn’t have been a shock to see Top Gun-era Cruise popping up on the screen.

Thankfully, though, director Christopher McQuarrie ultimately decided against the idea, even if he did admit to Games Radar that he seriously considered becoming the latest to hop on the bandwagon.

“Originally, there had been a whole sequence at the beginning of the movie that was going to take place in 1989. We talked about it as a cold open, we talked about it as flashbacks in the movie, we looked at de-aging. One of the big things about it I was looking at while researching, I kept saying, ‘Boy, this de-aging is really good’ or ‘This de-aging is not so good.’

Never did I find myself actually following the story. I was so distracted by an actor that I had known for however long was now suddenly this young person. In researching that, I cracked the code – I think – on how best to approach it. By then, we had kind of moved away from it. We may still play with it. We never say never.”

De-aging isn’t completely off the table for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two, then, but let’s keep our fingers crossed that McQuarrie moves onto other things instead of sending the IMF’s best straight to the uncanny valley.