If you’ve seen Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1, you’ll know it ends with a frankly incredible train sequence. This features Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and Hayley Atwell’s Grace climbing through the derailed train as it begins to plunge off a broken bridge, naturally after Hunt landed on it by jumping off a cliff on a motorcycle too.
Well, we now know that originally that Orient Express section was going to be a whole lot longer. Speaking to Variety, the film’s editor Eddie Hamilton has said the whole sequence "was about an hour-and-a-half long in our first iteration. We got it down to like 50 minutes in the finished movie."
Interestingly, Hamilton gave some insight into what they cut in order to get it down in the final version too. He explained that the moment when the carriages begin to topple over into the ravine was much longer before they screened it for test audiences. "It was originally a bit longer and we lifted a few sections out because they were saying it was too much," he added.
While the film is already a pretty hefty length at two hours and 43 minutes long, we must admit we’re quite intrigued to see what a longer version of that incredible sequence would have looked like. Maybe we can petition for the Christopher McQuarrie cut?
For more, check out our rankings of the best Mission: Impossible movies as well as our latest coverage:
