THR analyzes the appeal of Tom Cruise’s M:I series

Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation’s teaser poster

The Hollywood Reporter has published an article examining why Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible film series remains popular.

Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation, the newest film in the series, is due for release on July 31. It’s the fifth entry in 19 years. Here’s an excerpt from The Hollywood Reporter story about the M:I series differs from other film franchises.

The Mission: Impossibles are almost a stealth series; they’re released some distance apart (Mission: Impossible II followed four years after the first, with the third six years after that; Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol arrived five years later, making this summer’s Rogue Nation seem almost rushed with just a four year window between movies), and lack the tight self-referential nature of modern genre franchises. You really can go into each movie entirely fresh and learn all there is to know within a matter of minutes. (Mostly because all you really need to know is “Tom Cruise plays an unstoppable super spy.”)

The initial M:I film in 1996 included Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), the lead character played by Peter Graves for six of the seven seasons of the 1966-73 series. But that movie turned Phelps into a villain, with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt vanquishing Phelps.

2011’s Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol, directed by Brad Bird, actually dug into the original show for some major sequences (albeit bigger and better versions for the screen).

Paramount, the studio that releases Cruise’s M:I movies, originally scheduled the new film for Christmas but moved it up to the summer. Studios generally don’t move up movies on the schedule if they don’t believe in their prospects. We’ll soon see whether star-producer Cruise still has his golden touch.

U.N.C.L.E. director says he sought ’60s look for film

Logo for The Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie

Guy Ritchie, during a press junket in London this week for The Man From U.N.C.L.E., said he tried to give the movie a ’60s look and make it different visually from his previous projects.

“I’m quite well known for using slow-mo shots and we did none of those,” the director told ScreenSlam.com in a video interview the website uploaded to YouTube.

The U.N.C.L.E. movie was done as a period piece and is set in 1963.

“It was a constant process of using either old techniques such as split-screen or doing as much as we could in camera,” he said. “We tried to stick to a theme of ’60s filmmaking.”

The director also said U.N.C.L.E. wasn’t “going to compete with $200 million movies in terms of action for action’s sake.” The U.N.C.L.E. movie had a $75 million production budget.

The ScreenSlam.com video is below. Ritchie was interviewed along with Lionel Wigram. Both co-wrote the film’s script and are among the four producers of the movie. The film will be released in the United States on Aug. 14. Shoutout to @laneyboggs2001 on Twitter, who flagged the video.

007 Magazine examines SPECTRE’s script issues

No spoilers in this post. You’re on your own if you click on the links.

Graham Rye’s 007 Magazine has posted A LENGTHY STORY about SPECTRE, including A PORTION about script issues involving the 24th James Bond film.

The story by Luke G. Williams is split into two parts. The first sums up production developments involved with SPECTRE. The second part delves into the hacking at Sony Pictures, which caused at least some SPECTRE script drafts and numerous executive memos about the film to become available.

Some of the information about the scripts has been written about by other outlets, but 007 Magazine goes into further details.

The movie’s initial writer was John Logan, who was brought in to rewrite the efforts of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade on Skyfall. With SPECTRE, Purvis and Wade were brought in to revamp Logan’s efforts.

To read the entire article, CLICK HERE for part one, and CLICK HERE for part two. Spoilers are in part two.