Up until 1996, Mission: Impossible was best known as a popular TV series that aired from 1966 to 1973, but then the property was brought to the big screen, where it’s thrived ever since. That first Mission: Impossible movie got off to a pretty brutal start though, as the members of Ethan Hunt’s IMF team were killed one by one, including Emilio Estevez’s Jack Harmon. But as it turns out, Tom Cruise regretted killing off Estevez’s character and tried to bring him back for another movie.
The actor known from The Outsiders and The Breakfast Club learned this straight from Cruise himself, recalling how a year after Mission: Impossible came out, the star of the blockbuster franchise had told him, “Man, we made such a mistake killing you off.” Emilio Estevez then stated Cruise had been looking for a way to fit him into 2000’s Mission: Impossible 2, saying:
He and John Woo were trying to figure out a way to bring me back for part two, but it just didn’t make sense. I thought you could have because with all the masks, right?
For those who need a refresher, Jack Harmon, the equipment technician for the mission in Prague, was impaled by a spike above an elevator shaft, a particularly gruesome way to go out. It was later revealed that Jon Voight’s Jim Phelps, who was leading the mission, was a mole in IMF, and he was the one who arranged for Jack and the others to be killed. During the interview with Uproxx, Estevez shot down the idea that Cruise had his character killed off as “friendly payback” for Estevez’s Billy the Kid shooting Cruise’s cameoing character in Young Guns.
The Mission: Impossible Movies In Order And How To Watch Them Streaming
In the aftermath of Mission: Impossible’s release, evidently Tom, Cruise had second thoughts about Jack Harmon’s fate, and as Emilio Estevez sees it, given how often characters use those cool IMF masks to disguise themselves as others, that could have been enough to have the real Jack come into play during Mission: Impossible 2. For that to work though, we’d need to learn who actually died in Jack’s place during the first Mission: Impossible movie, but it’s a moot point in the end. Aside from bringing back Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell, Cruise was surrounded purely by new faces in the John Woo-directed sequel (which deserves more love), including Dougray Scott, Thandiwe Newton and Brendan Gleeson, among others.
So it’s unlikely will ever see Estevez back in the Mission: Impossible franchise, but the good news for fans of the first movie is that one of its more important characters will be back for the next installment. The Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One cast includes Henry Czerny reprising Eugene Kittridge, the IMF director who was determined to capture Ethan Hunt when he believed he was the mole. In Czerny’s mind, in the decades since we last saw Kittridge, "he’d been to all the agencies on some level or other" and gotten "a good idea now of how the game is played and what his place is in this mechanism of national intelligence." However, judging by the Dead Reckoning Part One trailer, it appears he and Ethan will once again be at odds.
We’ll see what happens between the two of them when Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One opens as one of the 2023 new movie releases on July 12. If you’d like to rewatch the first Mission: Impossible movie after reading this article, it and its sequels can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription.
