Tom Cruise Wasn’t De-Aged For Mission: Impossible Because It Looked Too Weird
At 61 years old, Tom Cruise is still playing a young man’s game. He does insane stunts and looks great doing them, but time affects even movie stars. As reported by Deadline, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie contemplated a sequence for the new film that would de-age Tom Cruise back to his late 80s self, but axed the idea because the effect was too distracting.
The pitch was to set flashbacks, or even a cold open for the new Mission: Impossible, in 1989. There, audiences would see Tom Cruise as they saw him circa Born on the Fourth of July and Days of Thunder. After a lot of research, the team decided against the de-aging sequence.
Flashback scenes in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning were initially going to use tech to de-age Tom Cruise, but the director scrapped the idea because it didn’t look natural and was distracting.
Describing his decision-making process, McQuarrie recalled, “I kept saying, ‘Boy, this de-aging is really good’ or ‘This de-aging is not so good.’ Never did I find myself actually following the story. I was so distracted by an actor that I had known for however long was now suddenly this young person.”
McQuarrie makes a good point. Digital de-aging is incredible when done perfectly, but it has to be perfect. That sounds like the Tom Cruise motto anyway, but McQuarrie realized there is a time and place for everything, and Dead Reckoning was neither for a de-aging gimmick.
Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film The Irishman employed the technique to create young versions of Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci. In some shots, it was flawless. In others…
“I kept saying, ‘Boy, this de-aging is really good’ or ‘This de-aging is not so good.’ Never did I find myself actually following the story. I was so distracted by an actor that I had known for however long was now suddenly this young person.”
Christopher McQuarrie
Disney, the ultimate operator of Hollywood’s nostalgia machine, can’t help but de-age actors. Every time a new Star Wars movie or show releases, someone shows up de-aged or digitally recreated. Sometimes it works, and other times…
De-Aging Harrison Ford
A de-aged Tom Cruise would have made headlines, but he wouldn’t have even been the only movie star on the big screen this summer to roll the clock back. One of the most high-profile uses of digital de-aging came in last month’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, another movie with Disney behind the scenes.
The film’s entire opening sequence stars a digitally de-aged Harrison Ford. Once again, the results are mixed, and audience immersion is spotty.
All that said, Christopher McQuarrie thinks a de-aged Tom Cruise could still be on the horizon. The director claims to have had an epiphany about how to make the technology work, but noted that, by the time he figured it out, the team had moved on from using the technology in Dead Reckoning.
Audiences may see Tom Cruise get a few years taken off in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two or in some other project he and McQuarrie have cooking up. In any case, fans will get to see Tom Cruise as he appears today in Dead Reckoning – Part One in theaters this weekend.
The film is the seventh in the Mission: Impossible franchise, and early reactions are calling it one of the best. Tom Cruise and the Mission: Impossible team are addicted to pushing the limits, and their latest effort promises to do just that.
All that said, Christopher McQuarrie thinks a de-aged Tom Cruise could still be on the horizon.
Dead Reckoning – Part One follows Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, an IMF agent who must lead his team in a race to find a world-threatening weapon. This classic action movie premise serves as a vehicle for a whole host of pulse-pounding set pieces that Cruise and company are hopeful will bring audiences to theaters with the same fervor as last year’s Top Gun: Maverick.
Tom Cruise may be 61, but he is still spry and once again ready to take on the post-COVID box office. For now, he will do so with his natural glow, saving a digitally enhanced one for when he really needs it.
