Due to the life cycle of the movie business, the ongoing WGA Writers strike was not going to have bring the entire industry to a halt immediately. But everybody understood that the longer it went on, the more projects would be impacted. We’re now starting to see significant delays in film and TV; some movies that were planned to start filming being delayed, and release dates being pushed back. But apparently one report of a movie halting itself mid-production, Tom Cruise‘s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two, may not be entirely accurate.
Mission: Impossible 8 has currently taken a break in filming, and in a recent interview director Christopher McQuarrie said that production on the film saw challenges due to the current strike, and this apparently led some to connect those dots and assume that the pause in filming was due to the strike. But Deadline reports that the current break was always part of the plan, as everybody is currently focused on promoting Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which is set to hit theaters in less than a month.
That’s not to say that the WGA strike might not present future issues for that project. The Deadline story specifies that when Dead Reckoning Part Two resumes filming later this summer, there are hopes that the strike will have been resolved. If that isn’t the case, there very well could be complications. No changes of any kind can be made to a script without a WGA writer to make them, and right now there are no writers working in productions due to the strike.
Film productions frequently need to make allowances for their stars to take a break from filming one movie in order to promote a different film. And certainly when the decision was made to shoot two Mission: Impossible movies back-to-back, it was understood that would be an issue here. While the actual filming of Mission: Impossible 7 was delayed by years due to the global pandemic, the decision to shoot the movies together and release them about a year apart never changed.
We are starting to see the WGA strike have a real impact on film productions. Disney just made major changes to its release calendar, and it’s difficult to believe the strike didn’t play a part in some of that. While some major productions, like Deadpool 3 are shooting during the strike, many believe that movie will benefit from the fact that so much of Ryan Reynolds’ voice is handled in post-production, and thus shooting the script without changes now won’t be an issue as a lot can still be changed later.
At this point, it does look like most of the serious delays are over, and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two will have a production schedule more like what we were used to seeing pre-pandemic, but movies get delayed all the time for all sorts of reasons, so the possibility that the two-part Mission: Impossible adventure might have a wider gap between entries than planned will remain possible right up until the end.