Director Brad Bird Not Likely for Mission: Impossible 5
Posted 04.18.12 by Ryan
While Paramount has yet to make an official announcement, a Mission: Impossible 5 seems like a near-certainty after the huge success of the the fourth installment, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, which earned $693 million — the highest worldwide of the entire franchise. Rumors that Paramount was hoping to move quickly on a fifth Mission: Impossible started surfacing after Ghost Protocol opened last December, and while it would seem that Tom Cruise and his IMF team of Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, and Jeremy Renner will likely follow for another round, it appears that director Brad Bird will not.
With Ghost Protocol finally out on DVD and Blu-Ray as of yesterday, Bird told Crave Online that he wasn't likely to return for a second Mission.
No, I think that one of the things that’s fun about the series is that they always pull in a different director and try to get a different kind of take on the premise. I’d probably be open to looking at it, but I think that part of one of the successes of the franchises is that they’re always reassessing it with a new director. That was one of the things that attracted me to it. It’s not a franchise where it was about dismissing your style in order to get the style of the franchise. It was more about [having] each director influence the franchise. Because whatever you think about the Mission: Impossible films, they don’t look like they were made by the same person. They’re the same premise and the same lead actor and all of that, but they feel like four distinctly different movies, style-wise.
What Bird will do next is uncertain. While the director has expressed interest in a sequel to his 2004 hit The Incredibles, Bird said last year that, while he has "several good ideas" for a sequel, he doesn't "have a whole movie yet." That leaves Bird's dream project about the San Francisco earthquake, 1906, as the strongest contender for the director's services, but Bird admitted he still hasn't "cracked it yet."
It’s still an idea that I’m attracted to. It’s an incredibly challenging idea to get into a single movie. I don’t think that you can break it up into two, and have 1906 II: The Rebuilding. I think that the challenge is that it’s a very sprawling canvas, and you want to get it all in one film and have it be satisfying and take advantage of all the wonderful things that that idea, that that particular place at that moment in time, has to offer. But it’s a very challenging thing to get to work as a script.
It seems doubtful that Bird will rush a decision on his next project, but we're keeping our fingers crossed that Paramount finds a way to convince Bird to accept another Mission: Impossible before the possibility completely self-destructs.