'Mission: Impossible 8' director wanted to kill off Tom Cruise's character?

Director Christoper McQuarrie had an alternate ending for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

The ending of the eighth sequel showed Ethan Hunt and his team pulling out another successful mission safely.

However, McQuarrie did consider killing Hunt in an alternate ending, but he did not do it.

In conversation with Empire Magazine, the 56-year-old filmmaker said, “Everything is on the table."

"There was a moment in the editing of the final sequence of the movie where Ethan goes spinning into that cloud bank where I thought, ‘If you cut to his grave right now, you’d feel the sacrifice was sufficient.”

McQuarrie thought for a second that not killing Tom’s character would keep opportunities open to revisit the franchise for a ninth entry.

“The idea of a conclusion of a story being the death of that character… they are not one and the same. When you fully tie off the story, the story ceases to be. And that’s not life. Stories go on, whether or not the movies do”, he added.

MI 8 featured Cruise along with Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell.