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Paramount Pictures claimed not to be worried, but unlike Fox and Warner, they had only one true real “tent pole” — a brand-name film series that can provide an instant infusion of customers and cash.

The Jack Ryan series had stalled when Ben Affleck replaced Harrison Ford, and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had still not begun the promised new chapter of the Indiana Jones saga. Now it was looking like Mission: Impossible III had turned out to be just that: Impossible.

The first proposed release date, May 2004, had come and gone. It would take five writer-directors and several recastings before M:I 3 would make it to the screen with J. J. Abrams of Lost and Alias satisfying Tom Cruise’s expectations.

It will open, finally, at midnight Thursday — a full 10 years after the first Mission: Impossible exploded onto the screen.

Robert Towne, who wrote the scripts for the first two M:I films, fully expected to write this one and had been tinkering with an idea, but, he said, “there’s really nothing you seriously do with these things until they settle on a director.” And star Tom Cruise hadn’t. All Cruise really knew is that he wanted the third film to have a different feel, “just like the second one by (director) John (Woo) was different from the first,” directed by Brian DePalma, he said.

Finally, Cruise settled on David Fincher, the then-edgy auteur of dark films like Seven and Fight Club. But a year of back-and-forth produced neither a script nor a movie, and Cruise took an even larger chance.

Having seen and loved the low-budget indie Narc directed by Joe Carnahan, he handed the job to him. But Carnahan was fired in July 2004. Cruise, unhappy with Carnahan’s scaled-down approach, told the Detroit Free Press, “It’s supposed to be ‘Mission: Impossible,’ not ‘Mission Sort of Hard.’”

The release was pushed back to 2005, and Shawshank Redemption writer-director Frank Darabont came on board and wrote a script that pleased Cruise. The problem: No director.

“Someone told me Tom Cruise was on the phone, and I said, ‘Yeah, sure,’” says J.J. Abrams. “I had met him once, but we had never talked business.”

Cruise wanted to talk business; someone had given him a boxed set of a complete season of Alias, the complicated, sophisticated spy-versus-spy TV show that Abrams wrote and produced. Cruise loved it. He wanted Abrams to read the script, with eyes to directing M:I 3.

“I was really intrigued and excited, and it was a good script, but it wasn’t something I thought I could do, and I didn’t want to be the one to wreck the franchise. And, we were about to start working on the pilot for Lost. So I told him no.”

Naturally, “no” doesn’t sit well with Cruise, but Abrams was adamant. He said he would love to make his directing debut on a film like M:I 3 and felt capable of stepping up to the bigs. But he would want to start from scratch, on a new script, and that would take too long.

“But then I told him the sort of story I had in mind, which was basically, ‘Let’s humanize Ethan Hunt (Cruise’s spymaster), and make the story about that.”

Cruise waited nearly a year for Abrams to finish his script, in which Hunt will find himself forced to chose between his fiancee, played by Michelle Monaghan, and his job of keeping the world safe from evil, represented this time by villain Philip Seymour Hoffman.

What kind of villain?

“A really, really bad one,” says Hoffman, who says he was fascinated by the mechanics of big-budget action filmmaking. “I spent the morning hanging out of half an airplane,” he says. But he was eager to see whether the finished film would actually contain “the heart these things need to keep pumping.”

“The great thing about having Philip, “ says Abrams, who says he has known the actor for 18 years, “is that he can go toe-to-toe with Tom. I’m not talking physically, although he does all that. He surprised the hell out of everybody with how vicious he could be.

But I’m talking about a having a conflict of real equals, which is what you need to maintain tension in films where you expect the good guys to win. You bring in guys like him, Ving Rhames, Michelle, Laurence Fishburne and Billy Crudup, you just immediately make this more than a summer action movie.”

Rhames is the only returnee from the earlier movies. Crudup is a new team member, Fishburne plays Hunt’s new boss and Monaghan is the girl Ethan will marry — if they get out of this alive. Keri Russell, who starred in the Abrams TV series Felicity, is also in the movie, but the part played by her character is a secret that Abrams is asking writers to keep.[[In-content Ad]]

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