‘Mission: Impossible 6’ Will Give Tom Cruise ‘An Emotional Journey’

The Mission: Impossible franchise continues to get better with age. The latest installment to the franchise, 2015’s Rogue Nation, was widely regarded to be the best yet of the Mission: Impossible franchise, which means that it’s going to take quite a lot for the sixth edition to the series to just match it, let alone top it.

For Mission: Impossible 6 Paramount have once again turned to Christopher McQuarrie to try and match Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which he also wrote and directed. McQuarrie, who received an Academy Award for writing The Usual Suspects, has now provided an update for the sixth Mission: Impossible film, revealing that it’s going to take Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt on an emotional journey.

Christopher McQuarrie opened up to Empire Magazine about Mission: Impossible 6 during a live recording for the publication’s 250th episode at the Prince Charles Cinema in London, revealing that he wants to find out “who Ethan Hunt is” with the film.

“I’ve seen five of these movies and I don’t know who Ethan Hunt is. One movie sort of dealt with his personal life; the other movies are about people speculating what’s really going on in Ethan’s head. I want to know who Ethan is in this movie, I want an emotional journey for this character, and Tom really embraced it.”

Christopher McQuarrie admitted during this discussion that he doesn’t want to just squeeze this exploration of Ethan Hunt’s characterization into the blockbuster. In fact, Christopher McQuarrie admitted that while he has been working on Mission: Impossible 6 he has repeatedly had to remind himself, “I don’t want to string together a bunch of action scenes, I want to actually deal with character.”

But while that might leave moviegoers worried that Mission: Impossible 6 could be void of the high-octane action that fans demand from the franchise, Christopher McQuarrie explained that he’s coincidentally managed to link up this exploration of Ethan Hunt with a number of huge action scenes.

“So I put Ethan in a bunch of complicated moral quandaries, and I’m trying to find ways to connect them — and then, ironically, the way to connect them was through giant action scenes.”

In fact, Christopher McQuarrie even gave a little tease of one of Mission: Impossible 6’s biggest action scenes, suggesting that it’s going to involve Tom Cruise falling off a huge building. It must be a rather iconic building, too, because Christopher McQuarrie insisted that he could picture it being the poster for the film, too.

“I may have found something today. I came to Tom with a picture of something and Tom looked at it and said, ‘That’s awesome! I want to fall off of that!’ It’s like, OK, I can see it on a poster, and I can see Tom falling off of it.”

Christopher McQuarrie hasn’t got long until he finally starts work on Mission: Impossible 6, too, as he admitted during the same interview that production will finally begin in Paris on April 10th, while he insisted that the pre-production on the blockbuster has been “going great.”

All the way through the discussion Christopher McQuarrie repeatedly declared just how different Mission: Impossible 6 will be to its five predecessors, not just when it comes to its depiction of Ethan Hunt but in the way that it begins. That’s because Christopher McQuarrie has revealed that it doesn’t open up with an action sequence, which he insisted he had to convince the studio to agree to.

“It’s a very different Ethan Hunt, I can promise you that… It starts in a very unconventional way. It does not start with action. That was the hardest pitch of this movie.”

We’ll find out how different Mission Impossible VI is when it’s finally released in 2018.

[Featured Image by Paramount Pictures]