Christopher McQuarrie

Christopher McQuarrie (born 1968) won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at 27 for The Usual Suspects, directed The Way of the Gun and Jack Reacher, and then became Tom Cruise’s most durable collaborator — writing and directing Rogue Nation, Fallout, Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning, the four films that carried Mission: Impossible into its third decade.

Writing the villain before it arrived

In 2018 and 2019, hunting for a threat that could follow nuclear, chemical and biological menaces, McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen settled on information technology. He told Collider in July 2023 that when he pitched it to Cruise he warned the idea would have been “too intellectual for most people” a few years earlier; his bet was that audiences would arrive already carrying the dread, the way Cold War audiences carried the bomb. What he had detected, he said, was an anxiety in the zeitgeist about how technology was starting to run their lives — and the job of the movie was to give that anxiety a release.

The bet paid off in an uncomfortable way. Dead Reckoning Part One opened in July 2023 in the middle of the writers’ strike and days before SAG-AFTRA walked out, both disputes turning substantially on AI. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at the New York premiere, McQuarrie said the threat had gone from an abstract idea to something everyone understood, and conceded that what it had evolved into left him “a little freaked out.” Watching the movie and the technology evolve at the same rate, he said, was “something else.”

The film then acquired a policy footnote. In October 2023, announcing President Biden’s AI executive order, deputy White House chief of staff Bruce Reed told the Associated Press that Biden’s concern had deepened after watching Dead Reckoning at Camp David: “If he hadn’t already been concerned about what could go wrong with AI before that movie, he saw plenty more to worry about.” Beyond that admission of unease, McQuarrie has stayed out of the industry’s AI fight — he has not signed the letters, joined the campaigns, or, on the record, taken a position on the tools themselves.