Summary
- Director Christopher McQuarrie always knew that Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One would be bigger and longer than its predecessor, Fallout, due to the expanded cast and more in-depth story.
- Dead Reckoning Part One is already longer in runtime than Fallout, clocking in at nearly three hours.
- Despite similar critical reception and audience scores, Dead Reckoning Part One has not reached the same level of box office success as Fallout, earning less than $500 million worldwide.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but Christopher McQuarrie could have very well destroyed it in one. The director of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One reminisced about shooting the now iconic car chase sequence through the Italian city and on its fabled Spanish steps. And with the scope, breadth and attention to detail explored in Dead Reckoning Part One it’s not surprising to learn that McQuarrie always knew the sequel would dwarf its predecessor, Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
McQ said in an interview with Collider:
"Well, we knew with Fallout. Fallout really grew because of all the character and emotion we were putting into the story, all the things that we had discovered in Rogue [Nation] that was so unexpected. I knew I wanted to expand the cast, and I knew I wanted to give each one of those characters more to do, so I knew the movie was going to be bigger and longer than Fallout."
With a runtime of nearly three hours, Dead Reckoning Part One is already longer than Fallout’s two-and-a-half-hour length. However, the story has just begun. The battle for the cruciform key has been fought and won, but waging war with The Entity won’t conclude until Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two hits theaters next summer.
Dead Reckoning Would Never Be Wrapped Up In Three Hours
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’s director Christopher McQuarrie dished on the overarching storyline that couldn’t be wrapped up in a single three-hour film. Prior to the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) joining the picket lines to support the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike, the director talked about conceding the fact that Dead Reckoning should be an epic, two-film odyssey — rather than a single installment — when the cast and crew descended on Rome to present Part One to the city on June 19, 2023.
McQuarrie said in the same interview with Collider:
"And at which point I said, 'Why are we fighting this? Why are we going to try to jam this into two hours? Let's just break it in half and make it two movies.' That really was the rationale behind it being a two-part movie. It just, it wasn't just that the story was bigger but that we wanted more emotion in the movie."
He continued:
"Yeah, it's massive, and it was complicated by the fact that certain things in Part Two required stopping Part One to shoot them, whether it was because of weather or actor availability. And so, with all the other challenges that were confronting this movie while we were making it, there was the challenge of stopping in the middle, not even knowing what the full movie was, and trying to predict what it was in the second film. It's a testament to how great this team is and how patient this cast is. It's really something."
Dead Reckoning – Part One (96% Tomatometer rating) compares favorably with Fallout (97% Tomatometer rating) where critics are concerned, at the time of this writing. Both Fallout and Dead Reckoning Part One boast “A” Cinemascores, too, so audiences are in a dead heat when it comes to which film is better. So, the only real difference in reception lies with the movies' respective box office numbers. Fallout made nearly $800 million worldwide, while Dead Reckoning Part One still hasn’t reached the $500-million mark after four weekends on theatrical release.