How Tom Cruise Impacted The Deaths Of Mission: Impossible's First Team
Tom Cruise's involvement in Mission: Impossible resulted in one of the film's most shocking decisions. Before becoming a major motion picture franchise, Mission: Impossible was a popular television series focused on a small covert team of secret government agents who undertake a series of missions for an organization known as the Impossible Mission Force, or IMF for short. The series featured actors like Greg Morris, Peter Lupus, Peter Graves, Martin Landau, Lesley Ann Warren, Sam Elliot, and Leonard Nimoy.
In 1996, Cruise made Mission: Impossible the first film under his new production company Cruise/Wagner Productions with legendary director Brian De Palma at the helm. While the television series was known as an ensemble piece, Mission: Impossible the movie subverted expectations for audiences who were expecting a team-based film with the decision to kill said team in the film's opening sequence, leaving Cruise's character Ethan Hunt as the lone survivor. To really shock the audience, De Palma cast well-known actors like Kristin Scott Thomas and Emilio Esteves as part of the team that dies at the beginning of Mission: Impossible.
Related: Why The Mission: Impossible Franchise Changed (From Spies To Stunts)
In a recent appearance on the podcast Script Apart, Mission: Impossible screenwriter David Koepp reveals the decision to kill the team at the beginning of Mission: Impossible was due, in a sense, to Cruise. According to Koepp (via CBR), De Palma got the idea to kill everyone off because the film needed to focus on Cruise as a movie star as opposed to the ensemble nature of the original series. Koepp says:
«There's a fundamental flaw in Mission: Impossible as a movie with Tom Cruise, as a concept. It's an idea that
Read more on screenrant.com
