How Hollywood made Mission Impossible a Billion Dollar Movie Franchise

Mission Accomplished: A 60’s TV series that glorified government coups and 4th Amendment violations has become one of the biggest action franchises in Hollywood history.

After seven successful movies, it’s clear that Tom Cruise has managed to do what has eluded many others—converting a television spy series from the mid-1960s into an immensely profitable movie franchise while staying true to the source material.

At first glance, this is more difficult than it sounds—its own kind of Mission: Impossible without the passwords, anonymous messages, and self-destructing tape recorder. Consider the numerous attempts and accompanying failures to resurrect TV espionage series from the 60s and 70s into movie series.  The cinematic graveyard is littered with filmed failures: I Spy; The Man from Uncle; The Avengers; The Wild Wild West; The Saint; Get Smart. None of these successful and popular TV shows successfully managed the transition from the small screen to the cinema.  

Why was Mission: Impossible able to do what these others never did? I’d submit that there are four reasons why Mission: Impossible succeeded where the others failed – – and only one of those reasons is Tom Cruise, the cinematic superstar of our age.  Cruise has clearly been the driving force behind the quality of the M:I movies.  His dedication to the craft of moviemaking and to putting every dollar on the screen is unparalleled in motion pictures.  But attaching Tom Cruise to a movie franchise isn’t always a sure thing -- just look at Universal’s The Mummy or Jack Reacher. Cruise might guarantee a good opening weekend, but three great box office days are no guarantee of decades of success.    

What else made possible the success of Mission: Impossible? First, let’s review the history of the show.  

The Mission: Impossible TV series had its origins in the wake of the James Bond craze from the early 1960s. After 007 hit the screens,  TV producers rushed to duplicate his success.  I Spy blended action and comedy with the talents of Robert Culp and Bill Cosby.  The Man from Uncle drew on source material from Ian Fleming.  The Wild Wild West was an 1860s version of James Bond.  And when television did decide to satirize the spy genre, as in Get Smart, they made no attempt to hide their intentions.  

Mission: Impossible took a different approach.  Instead of focusing on the exploits of one or two secret agents, each week a team of secret agents came together to advance the national security interests of the United States by methods that weren’t likely to win applause from the UN General Assembly.  While the plots were complex, the format was simple. The leader of the Impossible Missions Force (Yes, Missions—it was plural in those days) received his orders via a hidden tape recorder with an accompanying envelope of pictures.  For some reason, the tape recorder, but not the pictures, self-destructed after five seconds.

In the first season, the leader of the IMF was Dan Briggs, played by Stephen Hill of Law & Order fame. The secret message opened with “Good morning, Mr. Briggs” and closed with “Good luck, Dan”. Hill, however, faded into the background about halfway through the first season. The reason for his slow motion disappearing act?  Hill was an observant Jew who refused to work on the Sabbath. The producers filmed around him, slowly de-emphasizing his character, and dropped him after the first season. They replaced him with the prematurely gray Peter Graves as Jim Phelps, who would lead the IMF for the next six seasons of its TV run and its two-season revival in the 1980s. 

While the team saw changes in the cast over its seven-year run, the archetypical characters remained the same.  There was a master of disguise and voices, played by Martin Landau (Rollin Hand) and then Leonard Nimoy (Paris).  The IMF had a requisite femme fatale, originated by Barbara Bain (Cinnamon Carter and Landau’s wife), who was followed by a revolving door of stars and guest stars, including Lesley Anne Warren, Lee Meriweather, Dina Merrill, Barbara Anderson, Lynda Day George, and Jane Badler, to name just a few. 

Two other IMF members stayed with the series throughout its run.  Peter Lupus played Willie Armitage, a hulking man.  Greg Morris played the electronics whiz Barney Collier.  (While a very young Sam Elliott played medical expert Doug Roberts, he only lasted a few episodes.)  

The format for each show rarely varied. Phelps would get the assignment from “the Secretary”, which would involve overseas missions such as stopping a war, preventing a coup, rescuing dissidents, overthrowing governments, and foiling assassination plots, with a few covert assassinations thrown in for good measure.  Phelps would retreat to his well-furnished apartment, and select members of his team from a folder conveniently labelled “IMF.”  After discarding a few photos, Phelps would select the same four or five IMF members every week, with a couple of guest stars thrown in.  The team would assemble in Phelps’ apartment and go over portions of the plot. 

One of the fun aspects of the show is that this scene never gave the audience the full picture of the IMF’s scheme.  But the audience knew the various pieces would play out over the next 45 minutes like little time bombs set to go off before the next commercial break.  The plots involved impersonating various Iron Curtain baddies, always with the use of plastic masks and voice impressions that were somehow never detected by enemy agents. The payoff came in the last act as the bad guys realized too late that they had been played, and the IMF assembled and drove off.  

In an era that saw Vietnam War protests growing, the world of politics intruded on the series.  After four seasons, the producers started thinking that it wasn’t all that fashionable (today, we’d say “politically correct”) to have a TV series that made covert American plots against enemy nations look cool.  The ratings told a different story, but no matter. The producers decided to shift the emphasis of the show to fighting organized crime in the United States.  

Beginning with season five, the IMF started taking on “the Syndicate”, an anodyne version of the Mafia, with the Secretary’s voice now informing Phelps that “conventional law enforcement agencies have been unable to [arrest/indict/apprehend criminal of the week]” . Why the producers thought that a TV show featuring weekly violations of Americans’ rights under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments was preferable to a TV show that uncovered foreign plots against American interests remains one of TV’s greatest mysteries. No matter—the show went on for three more years until its cancellation.  

So how faithful were the movies to this original format?  Let’s consider:

First, the characters.  Jim Phelps and Ethan Hunt are the team leaders played by Hill and Graves.  Benjie Dunn is a Scottish Barney Collier, while Luther Stickell combines the strong man Willie Armitage and computer expert Barney Collier, the age of the internet requiring two techno-geeks on the team.  The films stayed faithful to the parade of actresses who filled the pumps of femme fatale Cinnamon Carter—Claire Phelps, Sarah Davies, Hannah Williams, and those were just in the first film.  Nyah Hall, Zhen, and Jane Carter were all Cinnamon successors, with Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust being the best of the bunch.   

But as far as faithfulness is concerned, the first movie was a misfire. The story and screenplay by Robert Towne, David Koepp, and Steven Zaillian chose, perhaps as penance for the original’s politically incorrect adventures, to kill off the IMF team (all but Ethan Hunt) in the first act and to turn Jim Phelps into a resentful, bitter traitor in the third act.  

Having the villain of the piece turn out to be the star of the original show was a brutal slap in the face to the Mission: Impossible fandom.  Not to mention the fact that uncovering a mole by watching your team members get killed and arresting the one who’s left is probably not the most efficient use of IMF resources.  Original stars Peter Graves, Greg Morris, and Martin Landau all registered their disapproval at how their characters were mistreated.     

Still, the first film managed to set the format for the rest of the movies by otherwise adopting the format of the TV show.  But instead of one big sting carried out over an entire TV episode, the films would have two or three different schemes that played out during a 130 minute movie.  In the first film, for example, there was the plot to recover the NOC list, the plot to infiltrate the CIA, and the plot to trap Phelps.   

Take a look at the subsequent M:I movies and you can see how all the films stuck to the TV format. But that by itself wouldn’t have insured the success of the series without adding two new elements.  

The first of these is something that the TV show lacked—comedy.  Or, to be more precise, action comedy.  The original Mission: Impossible was played deadly serious. After all, democracy and freedom were at stake every week, and they were no laughing matter. The first three films, by and large, were similarly faithful.  There was nothing remotely humorous about avenging your dead teammates or keeping a fatal virus off the market.  

It was with the fourth movie, Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, that the successful cinema format finally emerged.  The persons to credit here are Simon Pegg and, no surprise, Tom Cruise.  The producers wisely knew that the audience needed some relief from the tension of the movie’s action and intrigue. That comedic relief was amply supplied by Pegg over the course of four movies. 

Just consider the opening thirty minutes of Ghost Protocol.  In the television series, springing Ethan Hunt from prison and the infiltration of the Kremlin would’ve been played straight. And no one was laughing during Cruise’s infiltration of the CIA in the first movie.  

That’s not the case with the opening scenes in Ghost Protocol, where the tension of the prison break is relieved by Pegg’s nervous babbling and Cruise’s nonchalance.  Computer genius Barney Collier would never be seen mouthing “sorry” as a guard is beaten by the prisoner his hacking unleashed.  Nor would Phelps and Barney wait each other out for one to yield to the other’s demands to “Go to the extraction point!” or “Open! The! Door!” as Dean Martin crooned in the background.    

The numerous action scenes in the last four movies are not only among the best ever put on screen, they provoke as much laughter as they do thrills.  The climb up the Burj Kalifa tower in Ghost Protocol. The opera house sequence in Rogue Nation.  The bathroom fight in Fallout. The jump onto the train in Dead Reckoning.     

Finally, the producers deviated from the series because they knew the secret to the success of any great action movie—a larger-than-life hero like Ethan Hunt needs to fight a larger-than-life villain, not one that could be dispatched with a few masks over the course of a TV episode.  Rather than repeat the TV show’s formula of villainous dictators and gangland hoods, the producers upped the ante for the post-Cold War era by focusing on stateless terrorists, both the real and virtual kind.  Foes such as IMF traitors were succeeded by nonideological organizations like Rogue Nation’s Syndicate and masterminds such as Solomon Lane.    

Faithfulness to the format, action comedy, larger-than-life villains—all three combined to imitate and elevate Mission: Impossible from a fondly remembered TV series into a record-setting franchise that still thrills and entertains almost sixty years after Dan Briggs accepted his first mission.