The Tom Cruise movie despised by the people who inspired it: “It’s crazy to do this”
As Tom Cruise has repeatedly made clear, he only makes movies with the widest possible audience in mind. Not that everyone else can fuck off, necessarily, but he doesn’t make them for anyone else.
Since he’s Tom Cruise, he doesn’t have to worry about the grubby fingerprints of studio interference, panicked screenwriters, or over-eager directors breathing down his neck. It doesn’t always go to plan, as The Mummy showed to embarrassing effect, but that’s his mantra, and he’s sticking to it.
That doesn’t mean he’s not a collaborator, either, with many of the filmmakers and actors that the diminutive daredevil has worked with over the years giving the impression that the sun shines out of his arse, with Cruise an open, honest, and accessible figure who’s always open to new ideas and different perspectives.
You can’t make a big-screen omelette without cracking the occasional egg, though, and in Cruise’s case, the mere existence of the Mission: Impossible franchise was taken as a grievous insult by some of the TV show’s original stars. Did he care? Not in the slightest, but that didn’t stop them from going public.
With almost $5 billion banked at the box office, and Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol and Christopher McQuarrie’s Rogue Nation and Fallout ranking as three of the most entertaining action blockbusters of the 21st century, the OGs who pilloried Cruise for ruining the formula were firmly in the minority.
The eight-film series and the seven-season TV show don’t have much in common other than an organisation called the IMF pulling off missions that really do seem impossible at first glance to the strains of Lalo Schifrin’s iconic theme song, but Peter Graves was furious when Jon Voight’s Jim Phelps was revealed to be a duplicitous traitor in Brian De Palma’s opener.
“I am sorry that they chose to call him Phelps,” he ranted. “They could have solved that very easily by either having me in a scene in the very beginning, or reading a telegram from me saying, ‘Hey boys, I’m retired, gone to Hawaii. Thank you, goodbye, you take over now.'”
Martin Landau, who played Rollin Hand, told MTV that killing off almost the entire team in the first act of Mission: Impossible soured him on the idea of ever making a cameo. “I was against that,” he said. “Why volunteer to essentially have our characters commit suicide? I passed on it. I said, ‘It’s crazy to do this’. The script wasn’t that good either!”
What about Barbara Bain, also known as Cinnamon Carter in the first two seasons? She refused to watch any of the movies because they had “nothing to do with the show,” describing Cruise’s death-defying antics as “a one-man thing, not a team,” saying a guest spot in the franchise “wasn’t of interest to me one way or the other.” The Mission: Impossible cast weren’t fans, then, not that it mattered a jot in the grand scheme of things.
