Tom Cruise Regretted One Mission: Impossible Kill And Tried To Rectify It

One of the many brilliant aspects of Brian De Palma's "Mission: Impossible" is the director's decision to kill off the entire Impossible Mission Force in the film's first set piece. Not only that, he shows us their demise in the cleverly cut opening title sequence. One minute, we're settling in for a star-studded actioner featuring Tom Cruise, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jon Voight, Emmanuelle Béart, Emilio Estevez, and Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė, then suddenly, all but Cruise and Béart are dead.

On one hand, this clears the decks for the film to be a star vehicle, but De Palma and screenwriter David Koepp quickly assemble a new team of rogue IMF agents to help Cruise's Ethan Hunt clear his name and, in one last nifty twist, get revenge against his duplicitous mentor, Jim Phelps (Voight). The movie winds up being a classic "Mission: Impossible" adventure, just not in the way fans of the television show expected.

Still, there is a fun camaraderie amongst Hunt's doomed colleagues, so much so that you can't help but wish we'd gotten an entire film with them. Cruise sensed this, and evidently tried to make it happen to an extent in "Mission: Impossible II." Why didn't it happen?

In a May 2023 interview with Uproxx, Emilio Estevez revealed that Tom Cruise regretted killing off the actor's Jack Harmon, a master technician who meets a grisly, De Palma-esque end atop an elevator car. And yet the door was theoretically open for Harmon to return. As Estevez told Uproxx:

"The way Tom had explained it, he said, 'Look, I'd love for you to come and join the cast. The whole opening number where everybody gets wiped out, it's going to be a lot of well-known people and all of them are going to go uncredited and it's really going to set up the level of peril for Ethan.' And I said, 'I'm in. You don't have to ask me twice, I'm in.'"

Alas, no matter how Cruise professed to regret Harmon's demise, he couldn't finesse a return for the second movie. "He and ['Mission: Impossible II' director] John Woo were trying to figure out a way to bring me back for part two," said Estevez, "But it just didn't make sense. I thought you could have because with all the masks, right?"

Stranger things have happened in the IMF universe (take Wolf Blitzer's goofy cameo in "Mission Impossible: Impossible — Fallout," for example), but it doesn't sound like Harmon can be resurrected from getting a metal spike rammed through his eye socket. Or maybe he's playing coy, and there's mo' Estevez on tap for "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part I." We'll find out when the hotly anticipated seventh installment hits theaters on July 10, 2023.