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Mission: Impossible director explains why Luther died in The Final Reckoning - and teases the potential Ethan Hunt death that almost happened
Fans still don't know what was happening with the mystery illness afflicting Ving Rhames' Luther, but at least director Christopher McQuarrie is talking about why the character died in The Final Reckoning
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After checking out Ethan Hunt’s seemingly last mission in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, fans had one big question: what was going on with Luther suddenly being sick and dying without any explanation or foreshadowing? According to the man responsible for the decision, it was all about upping the stakes for the movie — and giving Ving Rhames a challenge worthy of his time.
“The story was about sacrifice,” director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie told Empire. “The movie had no teeth without it, without some loss.”
It was also a loss that made sense from a practical standpoint, according to McQuarrie: “Ving is such a phenomenal actor, such a giving actor, and the franchise wasn't giving him those opportunities… I said, ‘We’ve got to get him out of the van and give him the more emotional stuff to play’. And he leaned into it. This was already forming in Fallout.”
From that point of view, killing off Luther makes a lot of sense (and arguably more sense than killing Ilsa Faust in 2023’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, as much as we all loved Rebecca Ferguson’s super spy). It doesn’t really explain Luther’s unnamed illness nor whether or not there’s unused footage from the movie somewhere explaining what that was all about, but for now, we’ll take it.
And if you were surprised that Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt didn’t die at the end of Final Reckoning, McQuarrie told Empire, “The idea of a conclusion of a story being the death of that character… they are not one and the same” — although he does admit that there was a moment where he considered doing so in the editing suite. “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. Wow, that’s very, very effective,’” the director said. But where would be the fun in that?
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is in theaters now.
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