Nicholas Hoult has joined the cast of the next Mission: Impossible film. Director Christopher McQuarrie made the announcement on social media, and this is a positive development for the franchise. Hoult may not give Tom Cruise the sort of hulking foil Henry Cavill was, but Hoult is incredibly talented.
Who will he play? Well, no one is quite sure yet. But, sources say that the next movie will introduce a character named Rollin Hand, who was played by Martin Landau on the original TV show. Hand was an actor, magician, and a master of disguises and voices who billed himself as ‘The Man Of A Million Faces’. Could Hoult be playing Hand? We probably won’t know until the first trailer eventually drops.
This is a timely role for Hoult though, because he had a pretty bad 2019. He starred in Tolkien, a biopic about the famed Lord Of The Rings author that you’re probably just finding out existed. No one saw it. He also starred in the last X-Men film of the current run, Dark Phoenix, which practically no one liked and failed miserably at the box office.
On top of that, he played Nikola Tesla in The Current War. Pretty good role, right? Except that the film had been shot two years prior and delayed before being dumped in cinemas without much of a hope. Also, his awards-season hopeful film, The Banker, was pulled from release by Apple in the wake of controversy. He also lost the role of Batman to Robert Pattinson. 2020 is clearly already an improvement.
The seventh and eighth films of the Mission: Impossible franchise will shoot back-to-back for Paramount and Skydance. It’s unclear right now whether that indicates they’ll be a two-film arc, or if this is just for budgetary purposes.
McQuarrie has helped take the franchise to new heights, culminating in one of the greatest action films of all time with Fallout. How the hell are he and Cruise going to top that? No one knows, but they’re no doubt going to give it a shot.
#Peace.Love.MissionImpossible
