Why the Original ‘Mission: Impossible’ Cast Hated the Movie Reboot
Long before Tom Cruise was hanging off airplanes and jumping motorcycles off cliffs, Mission: Impossible was a hit television series about a team of secret agents pulling off some pretty elaborate plans. The original show premiered on CBS on Sept. 17, 1966, making this year its 60th anniversary. Steven Hill led the first season as Dan Briggs, with Barbara Bain, Martin Landau, Greg Morris, and Peter Lupus among the familiar faces on his team.
Peter Graves joined in Season 2 as Jim Phelps and quickly became one of the stars most closely associated with the show. He stayed through the rest of its original seven-season run and even returned as Phelps when Mission: Impossible was revived in 1988.
So when Mission: Impossible became a Tom Cruise movie in 1996, bringing Jim Phelps back probably sounded like a nice way to connect the new version to the old one, but the storyline changed things drastically.
The original cast couldn’t believe what happened to Jim Phelps
Paramount/Everett Collection
Jon Voight took over the role of Jim Phelps in the 1996 movie, while Cruise starred as a new IMF agent named Ethan Hunt. At first, Phelps still seemed like the leader fans remembered. Then the movie revealed that he was actually the traitor behind the mission that killed most of his own team. He eventually tries to frame Ethan and is killed near the end of the movie. Graves wasn’t happy about what they did to the character he had played for years.
He said he had always viewed Phelps as an American hero and didn’t think he could have played him as a bad guy. Graves also said he wished the filmmakers had simply given Voight’s character another name.
“I am sorry that they chose to call him Phelps. They could have solved that very easily by either having me in a scene in the very beginning, or reading a telegram from me saying, hey boys, I’m retired, gone to Hawaii. Thank you, good-bye, you take over now,” he said at the time to CNN.
Greg Morris walked out of the movie
Courtesy Everett Collection
Morris had an even stronger reaction. Morris played electronics expert Barney Collier for all seven seasons of the original series. He went to see the new movie but left after about 40 minutes. His review was pretty short, according to Deseret News. “It’s an abomination,” Morris said. Sadly, he died just a few months after the movie came out, on Aug. 27, 1996, at age 61.
Landau, who played master of disguise Rollin Hand during the show’s first three seasons, wasn’t interested in returning either. Years later, Landau recalled being approached about an early version of the movie that would have brought back the original team, only to get rid of its members one by one. He said he didn’t like that idea at all.
Landau said the television version of Mission: Impossible was a “mind game,” according to SlashFilm. The fun was watching a team put together a complicated plan, get in, pull it off, and leave without anyone realizing what had happened. To him, turning it into a more traditional action movie changed the entire feel of Mission: Impossible.
Not everyone hated the finished movie
Paramount Pictures/ Everett Collection
Lupus, who played strongman Willy Armitage, remembered another early idea for the movie. In that version, members of the old team would get into trouble during a mission, and Cruise’s character would bring in his own people to help rescue them.
Lupus liked that idea, but it never happened. Unlike some of his former costars, he didn’t completely hate the movie audiences eventually saw. However, his bigger complaint was that it had become more like James Bond, with one major hero at the center instead of a team.
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