It’s taken a while to get there, but it has finally been confirmed today that Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible 3 IS going ahead, and will hit cinemas in May of next year.
The third instalment of the Cruiser’s spy saga, in which he plays renegade secret agent Ethan Hunt, has had a chequered development history, with directors – Joe Carnahan and David Fincher, notably – coming and going, cast members – Kenneth Branagh, Scarlett Johansson, Carrie Anne Moss – dropping out, and start dates receding in the wind.
New director JJ Abrams has been on board for a while, however, although even then there had been some speculation that the mega-budget movie might not start filming this year. Those fears were dashed today when it was confirmed by Paramount Pictures’ head cheese, Brad Grey, that the movie would start filming on July 18th in Italy. It will then head to various locations across Europe, the States and Asia.
With a release date of May 5, 2006, M:I-3 will have an even quicker turnaround time than its summer rival, X-Men 3, which also starts filming in August and comes out three weeks later. But Abrams has been attached and prepping the movie for a while now, while Cruise is used to fast turnarounds (War of the Worlds, which is out in a couple of weeks, started filming late last year).
Plot details are scarce, but we’re guessing that it will involve Cruise embarking on some sort of mission. Sources say it may even be an impossible mission, but we’re quite confident it’ll all end well.
Joining Cruise on this so-called impossible mission will be regular M:I team-mate Ving Rhames, alongside new cast members Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and the lovely Michelle Monaghan, who’s rather splendid in the quite wondrous and magnificent Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.
By the time next May rolls around, it will have been six years since John Woo’s bitterly disappointing Mission: Impossible 2 was released, to admittedly impressive box office takings. Can Cruise, who’s now 42, continue to cut the action hero mustard? Well, if the old saying ‘you’re only as old as the woman you feel’ is true, he should be bounding around up on screen like the Tasmanian Devil!
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