Tom Cruise regretted killing off Emilio Estevez and considered bringing him back in the future franchise.
Tom Cruise lived and made the Mission: Impossible franchise a ginormous hit franchise with critical accolades embedded in its glorious cinematic journey over the years. However, Cruise was not devoid of any mistakes and the actor regretted killing off one actor too early.
Cruise’s celebrated action franchise created a legacy since the first Mission: Impossible movie was released in 1996 and Cruise’s titular character Ethan Hunt— an agent in the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) espionage agency lived on with a huge fanbase. Of course, the franchise has been a spectacle but the death of many characters over the years in the movie series definitely rattled some fans.
Tom Cruise Convinced His The Outsiders Co-Star To Join Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible franchise has the most prominent role in forging Tom Cruise’s legacy as an action star. The franchise has pushed the actor to the edge of the limit and Cruise has been doing his own action stunts for the movies he appears in even today defying the burden of age. Still, the Top Gun star has one regret and that is killing off his co-star Emilio Estevez in the first Mission: Impossible movie itself.
“The way Tom had explained it, he said, ‘Look, I’d love for you to come and join the cast. The whole opening number where everybody gets wiped out, it’s going to be a lot of well-known people and all of them are going to go uncredited and it’s really going to set up the level of peril for Ethan.’ And I said, ‘I’m in. You don’t have to ask me twice, I’m in.’ And then afterwards, obviously, the movie’s a giant hit,” Estevez said in an interview with Uproxx.
However, fans might recall Cruise had a brief cameo in Estevez’s Young Guns where Cruise was killed off in the uncredited role. Was it a payback? “No,” the actor said adding “it wasn’t that at all.” But even before that, the duo appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 movie classic The Outsiders, and the movie was the beginning of the duo recognizing each other’s prowess.
Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible Regret
Estevez’s brief cameo in the movie was good, in fact too good for Cruise as the actor regretted killing Estevez’s character in the movie. Estevez who played Jack Harmon in the movie revealed that he could have been the recurring star in the franchise as Cruise was very much interested in bringing him back. “Still making them!” Estevez told Uproxx reflecting on the franchise that still producing movies.
“Tom was like, we were doing a run the year after that and he says, “Man, we made such a mistake killing you off,” he added.
But Cruise was not the only one to consider Estevez’s return John Woo who directed Mission: Impossible 2 very much wanted Jack Harmon in the movie.
“He and John Woo were trying to figure out a way to bring me back for part two, but it just didn’t make sense. I thought you could have because with all the masks, right?” Estevez added.
But it never came close to fruition, but still, Estevez’s resurrection would bring another angle to the narratives, or perhaps, another fan-favorite character in the long run. Currently. The franchise has one more installment, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 2 slated for release.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 2 is expected to hit theaters on 21 May 2025.