Mission: Impossible 6 director Christopher McQuarrie is busy putting the “finishing touches” on the film’s first trailer, but star Tom Cruise has revealed the official title of the summer action flick.
Cruise, who has starred in each of the franchise’s stories, shared that the new installment of Ethan Hunt’s adventures is titled Mission: Impossible — Fallout.
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The title was revealed on social media Thursday as Cruise posted an image of the production’s clapboard. “Get ready,” the actor teased.
Cruise also shared a new still shot from Fallout, which shows Ethan dangling off the side of a helicopter.
“We’ve upped the ante for the sixth #MissionImpossible,” he wrote. “I can’t wait for you guys to see more.”
McQuarrie said the title, which follows others including Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation, was a strategic, multi-dimensional play for the franchise.
“The title has multiple meanings in the film, from the literal to the figurative,” McQuarrie told Empire Online. “There is the threat of nuclear terrorism hanging over the movie, which is the literal threat. There’s the notion that what’s happened in the movie is the end result of choices that Ethan Hunt has made in his life. It’s Ethan’s past come back to haunt him. It’s the fallout of all his good intentions.”
As for the specific wording, McQuarrie said selecting a title was a late decision rather than one that was nailed down from the beginning. He joked that someone on the production team found a Mission: Impossible title generator, which matched two random spy/action words.
“We immediately created all the silliest titles we could,” he admitted. But during the random title game, McQuarrie realized it was time to break away from the two-word subtitles given to the previous two films.
“The one thing that came out of it was I thought it should be a one-word title,” he said. “This is a different kind of movie, it should be expressing a different attitude. It should be striking its own ground, and that’s what I felt Fallout did.”
Fallout will follow Ethan, his Impossible Missions Force team (Alec Baldwin, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames) and other familiar allies (Rebecca Ferguson, Michelle Monaghan) in a race against time following a mission gone wrong. It also cast Henry Cavill, Angela Bassett and Vanessa Kirby for roles in Mission: Impossible‘s sixth installment.
The film is scheduled to release in theaters on July 27.
