When the final Mission: Impossible film was retitled The Final Reckoning, fans started theorizing that maybe Ethan Hunt was going to die. After all, what better way to close out a decades-long franchise than to sacrifice its legendary lead? Turns out, that was actually very much on the table.
In a new interview with Empire, writer-director Christopher McQuarrie revealed that he seriously considered ending Ethan’s journey for good. He said:
“Everything is on the table. There was a moment in the editing of the final sequence of the movie where Ethan goes spinning into that cloud bank where I thought, ‘If you cut to his grave right now, you’d feel the sacrifice was sufficient. Wow, that’s very, very effective.’”
So yeah, there was almost a version of this movie where Ethan Hunt didn’t make it out alive. But McQuarrie ultimately pulled back from that ledge. He explained that ending Ethan’s story with death wasn’t quite the point.
“The idea of a conclusion of a story being the death of that character… they are not one and the same. When you fully tie off the story, the story ceases to be. And that’s not life. Stories go on, whether or not the movies do.”
Ethan Hunt’s entire mission has always been about survival against impossible odds. Killing him off might have felt like closure, but McQuarrie clearly saw it as a disservice to the story’s ongoing momentum.
And just like Ethan, the film’s main villain, the Entity, a rogue AI, also survives. That wasn’t accidental either. While Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro apparently pitched the idea that the Entity should scream as it was destroyed, McQuarrie opted for something more unsettling: let it live.
“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Really experienced experts in this field, who have been with it since its infancy, were telling me the only way that you’ll ever be able to now combat AI is with AI. It’s never going to go away.”
So instead of some grand, explosive finale, The Final Reckoning ends with the Entity merely contained. It’s still out there, unbeaten and undestroyed.
“Destroying the Entity was actually kind of a hollow and empty idea…. [Destroying the Entity is] not going to stop somebody else from making an Entity, and so the idea of Ethan keeping the Entity at the end was fully antithetical to everything we believed—and yet, there it was emotionally in the movie, and that’s how the ending came to be.”
McQuarrie didn’t want to pretend the mission was ever really over, and while he says he’s probably done with Mission: Impossible, he left just enough ambiguity to keep the door cracked.
“Do I think [Mission] is in my rear-view mirror? I want to say yes. Tom Cruise is a force of nature, and a very, very tricky one.”
My question is, if Ethan Hunt would have died, would Tom Cruise have pulled off the ultimate stunt and died for real!? That may be the real reason they decided to change it.
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