Tom Cruise Refused to End ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’ on a Cliffhanger, Told the Director: ‘It’s Got to Be Satisfying’

variety.com:

Zack Sharf Digital News Director SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses the ending of “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” currently playing in theaters. “Dead Reckoning,” the seventh installment of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, is the latest Hollywood blockbuster to be split into two movies, but Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie tried their hardest to give “Part One” a non-cliffhanger conclusion.

The filmmaker recently told Total Film magazine that thinking about how to conclude the first of two movies kept Cruise up at night during the filming of “Part One.” “Where we ended the movie was always where we were going to end it,” McQuarrie said of the train action sequence. “How we ended the movie was a big, big mystery for us.

It kept Tom awake at night throughout production. He would come in all the time and say, ‘This can’t be a cliffhanger, it’s got to be satisfying.’ The audience has to feel a sense of completion.” McQuarrie continued, “Tom kept looking at that scene, and he had all this anxiety about whether or not it would be a satisfying conclusion or whether it would feel open-ended.

We constantly revisited it, constantly refined it.” Unlike “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” which threw moviegoers a curveball by ending on a massive cliffhanger (its second part, “Beyond the Spider-Verse,” arrives in March 2024), “Dead Reckoning Part One” ends with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt achieving his immediate goal (he secures the key to unlock the source code of The Entity, the film’s villainous AI program) and Hayley Atwell’s Grace accepting an offer to join the IMF.