Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One is already long, clocking in at 2 hours and 36 minutes. However, the movie’s original cut was even longer, reaching almost 4 hours. Now, fans are asking Paramount Pictures to release the extended version of Mission: Impossible 7.
The demand comes after the longer cut was revealed by one of the movie’s editors, which featured a lengthy 90-minute climactic sequence.
In a recent interview with Variety, Dead Reckoning editor Eddie Hamilton revealed that the movie was nearly four hours long and had no music. Director Christopher McQuarrie reportedly had to make some tough decisions with the film’s theatrical version.
“The first time we watched it, it was nearly four hours long and had no music,” Hamilton revealed. “It was a tough watch because it was the first time Chris and I had ever watched the movie from beginning to end. Not having any score was a very strange experience. It’s almost a silent movie because there were no sound effects either.”
One of the major set-piece action sequences in the movie was centered around a train that the production team had to build from scratch. Hamilton shared that the epic sequence was originally “about an hour-and-a-half long” in the movie’s first cut. The ravine crash sequence featured in the climax was three minutes long on its own. The post-production team trimmed down the train sequence to around “50 minutes in the finished movie.”
Fans have taken to social media to petition Paramount to release the extended cut. Fans are asking the studio to add back all the deleted scenes from the original version.
Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One is only half of the story, with the second part scheduled for release in 2024. McQuarrie previously explained that the movie was too big and needed to be split into two parts.
“We knew the movie was so big, and rather than trying to contain it all in a two-hour movie, we just very early on said, ‘let’s break this up into two parts,’ ” McQuarrie explains. “A lot of characters, a lot of action. It was a very big story that needed two parts.”
The director also shared that the next chapter will potentially be even bigger than Mission: Impossible Fallout.
“Fallout really grew because of all the character and emotion we were putting into the story,” the director said. “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.
He adds, “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 wasn’t just that the story was bigger but that we wanted more emotion in the movie.”
Paramount may opt to release an extended or director’s cut of the movie once Part Two arrives in theaters next year. Studios often release extended versions of multipart films once all the movies in the series have premiered.
Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One is currently showing in theaters.
