It’s taken four years for director Christopher McQuarrie (Top Gun: Maverick) and Hollywood action hero icon Tom Cruise to complete the recently released Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part I.
McQuarrie and Cruise — and his co-stars (Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby and Rebecca Ferguson) — have been traveling around the world promoting the film at red carpet premieres, as seen above (in Sydney, Australia) and below (in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates).
On July 13, SAG-AFTRA, the actor’s union led by Fran Drescher (The Nanny), announced it is striking. According to the guidelines for a strike, SAG-AFTRA members “will not be able to attend premieres, do interviews for completed work, go to awards shows, attend film festivals or even promote projects on social media while the strike is in effect.”
While it’s difficult to imagine any filmmaker adhering to those rules when they just released a film that cost $290 million to produce, Cruise’s standing in the industry as its most bankable movie star gives him a stature that the union will need on its side to be effective — and no stars are expected to break the union’s rules.
[NOTE: Not promoting the film may seem like its own “mission impossible” — and this time Cruise is even forbidden to do his own stunts.]
One potential positive outcome from the strike, perhaps, is that what the new release will lack with Cruise unable to promote it, it could make up for due to a lack of entertainment competition.
With the writers strike already hobbling TV production and now the actors strike piling on, consumers looking for escapism and a good story will have fewer options. Cruise, as has been the case throughout his career, delivers the goods this summer in his seventh Mission Impossible installment.
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