The next two entries in the extremely popular Mission Impossible series will be titled Dead Reckoning, and act as a two-part story that concludes the long-running series. Speaking on the Light the Fuse podcast, director Christopher McQuarrie revealed the reason for the name.
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“When I came up with the title, I knew it applied more to Part Two than it did to Part One, which is why it eventually settled on being Part One and Part Two,” McQuarrie said (via ActioNewz). “The title for the first movie was nearly a title that referred to something like a Ghost Protocol kind of thing, it was a government policy — It wasn’t a government policy, it was a government, what would you call it? A government measure of last resort, with catastrophic consequences.”
McQuarrie went on to say that by the time the first film is over, the title for the film would not have worked as well, so they decided to come up with another one. In doing so, they landed on Dead Reckoning, then began the process of trying to figure out exactly what that could mean over the course of two films.
“By the time we got to the end of Part One, that had distilled down into an entirely different set of circumstances that appear in Part Two and not in Part One,” said McQuarrie. “So, the word would no longer have been appropriate for the title of Part One … And yet, Dead Reckoning didn’t really apply as well to Part One as well as it did to Part Two until we started to play with the beginning of the movie, and kind of recognize that Dead Reckoning, while it sounded cool, what did it really have to do with the movie?
And over the course of our really starting to dig down into the arc of the character journey for Ethan [Hunt], it took on deeper and deeper meanings as we went, And you’ll see just how thematic and how it represents, how it’s conceptually represented in every character’s journey in this film we’re in.”
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Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and Part Two will be released on July 14, 2023, and June 28, 2024, respectively.