Paramount CEO Recalls ‘Stalemate’ With Tom Cruise Over Mission: Impossible 7 Budget

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Paramount CEO Recalls ‘Stalemate’ With Tom Cruise Over Mission: Impossible 7 Budget

Paramount CEO Brian Robbins has shared details of a “stalemate” he reached with Tom Cruise over the Mission: Impossible 7 budget.

Cruise produced and starred in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, an action spy movie where he returned to his famous role as IMF Agent Ethan Hunt in the seventh movie of the long-running franchise. The budget for Dead Reckoning was a whopping $290 million, which is much greater than the budget for the film’s predecessor, Mission: Impossible — Fallout, which cost $178 million.

Variety reports the movie went over budget as a result of COVID delays and the filmmakers’ desire to add the exciting opening sequence surrounding a Russian submarine. This scene was originally supposed to be in the next movie, but Cruise and writer/director/producer Christopher McQuarrie decided to put it in the seventh film. Paramount needed to assume the cost entirely as Skydance Media required the studio to assume overages over $240 million.

“Let’s just say that the studio and the production and Tom were in a disagreement over direction, and there was a stalemate going on,” Paramount CEO Brian Robbins says. “We had to hit the pause button. They were stuck on how they were going to move forward with ‘Dead Reckoning Part Two’ while finishing ‘Part One.’”

“It was a production issue, and it was about the scope of what was being asked for,” he says. “And the question we needed to ask was, do we need this and why? And then how big is it going to be, and how long is that going to take?”

Are there Mission: Impossible 7 post-credits scenes?

No, there is no end-credits scene.

The cast includes many familiar faces such as Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, and Henry Czerny reprises his role from the original Mission: Impossible. New cast members include Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Shea Whigham, Pom Klementieff, and Cary Elwes.

“Ethan Hunt and the IMF team must track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity if it falls into the wrong hands,” reads the official synopsis. “With control of the future and the fate of the world at stake, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan is forced to consider that nothing can matter more than the mission — not even the lives of those he cares about most.”