30 Years Ago the Mission: Impossible Franchise Kicked Off With a Massive Fan Betrayal (But a Very Cool Movie)

Imagine if in The Force Awakens, Han Solo had turned out to have arranged for the outright murders of Poe, C-3PO and, hell, let’s throw Chewbacca in, that occurred early on in the film, as he tells Rey how he’s actually joined the First Order and is working with them, forcing Rey to kill him to stop his evil plan. Or if in Creed 2, the fix was in and Rocky Balboa was actually helping the Dragos defeat Adonis for his own, bitter reasons. And then, um, I guess Adonis has to kill Rocky… Let’s just go with the analogy here, okay?

Such was the case 30 years ago this week, on May 22, 1996, when the first Mission: Impossible movie opened. Based on the TV series that ran for seven seasons between 1966-1973, the film involved IMF agent Ethan Hunt left as the only survivor when his team is killed off, while on a mission to protect a list of CIA undercover agents from being stolen. As the story progressed, Ethan’s hunt (hah!) for the mole who betrayed them, and framed him in the process, leads to the big reveal that the actual treasonous villain was team leader Jim Phelps, the heroic protagonist from the TV series, where he was played by Peter Graves. The movie then concluded with Jim dying in a fight with the film’s new hero, Ethan.

Were fans of the original series upset about this? They were! And even with the internet in its early days, I recall seeing complaints popping up on some film sites and stories on entertainment shows about it. Most of that is lost to time, but you can find more recent complaints from old school fans since it still pops up as a talking point. But a few things helped soften the blow for Paramount and keep it on the down low. There’s the obvious lack of social media (and the internet in general still in its infancy), which stopped things from amplifying in the way it would have today. A new actor, Jon Voight, was playing Phelps, meaning this didn’t actually have to be considered the same version of the character. And lastly, most hardcore Mission: Impossible TV show fans who cared about Jim Phelps were, generally speaking, older than the target audience for the movie and Paramount was likely happy to ignore their complaints as long as they didn’t snowball.

The 1990s were an especially busy time for old TV series being revived as modern movies. Whether comedy or drama, still culturally relevant or mostly forgotten, every old show with any sort of name value (and even a couple that didn’t have much of that any longer) seemed up for this treatment: The Brady Bunch, McHale’s Navy, The Fugitive, The Beverly Hillbillies, freaking Car 54, Where Are You? And that’s not even counting the many animated shows revamped as live-action films…

But while there were several hits among these films – and The Fugitive even became an Academy Award-winner – the example that turned into the biggest long-term success has to be Mission: Impossible. M:I wasn’t just a big hit in its own right, it would launch an eight-movie (and counting?) franchise that has brought in well over $4 billion worldwide in the decades since. This is especially notable and impressive; while Mission: Impossible had been a hit series, the show really didn’t have the staying power that kept people watching again and again or particularly popular with the generations that followed.

Something Old, Something New

As someone who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I vividly recall how constant syndicated reruns and merchandise made the “before my time” likes of The Brady Bunch, Star Trek, Batman ‘66, and The Twilight Zone incredibly familiar to my friends and I. Yet Mission: Impossible was, for the most part, not really something on the radar for us, beyond recognizing the title and knowing that amazing and iconic theme music, which was still a go-to in commercials and as a needle drop in movies.

That allowed the first M:I to be its own thing for many of us watching, even as fans of the original lamented that the movie quite literally blew up the team dynamic the show was known for, killing off almost everyone at the film’s start so that Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt could take center stage. But the Jim Phelps twist got a lot of attention in particular because it was so egregious for old school fans. Though he wasn’t in the show’s first season – he replaced Steven Hill as the original lead, Dan Briggs – Graves’ Phelps was the center of the series from Season 2 until the end, serving as the show’s focal point and poster boy. He was for all intents and purposes M:I’s Captain Kirk and it would sound outrageous to suggest making him an outright irredeemable villain in a new story.

And yet not only did the first Mission: Impossible movie do this, but the filmmakers originally wanted Graves to return to play the character, which would have much more firmly positioned the film as a legacy sequel to the TV show (and its brief 1988 revival). This would have made the outrage over Phelps’ heel turn much more intense, removing any distance a new actor provided. As it turned out, Graves himself heavily disliked the idea, turning down the offer to reprise the role. In an interview with CNN, Graves lamented how the filmmakers chose to make Phelps the villain, preferring they simply had his character – whether established by a cameo or just mentioned via dialogue – go into retirement, and a new character be the IMF traitor ultimately played by Voight.

Of course, none of this stopped Mission: Impossible from being a huge hit, bringing in over $450 million worldwide on an $80 million budget. Its success is easy to understand because that first movie still holds up. Hiring Brian De Palma as director, who already had a sizable and acclaimed body of work under his belt with movies like Carrie, Dressed to Kill, and Blow Out, was an offbeat but inspired move, utilizing his knack for crafting suspenseful sequences on a much larger scale than ever before. Cruise, in the midst of a hell of a run of movies in the ‘90s – he’d have another major hit later in the same year with Jerry Maguire – put his movie star charisma to terrific use as Ethan, and we get the first glimmers of his “put me in, Coach” propensity to do his own stunts that would escalate to increasingly wild, death-defying levels as the series continued. Here, it was more down-to-earth stuff that was still highly unusual for a movie star, like actually running from a massive exploding aquarium on set, instead of using a stuntman. And of course, the terrific CIA break-in sequence and its instantly iconic image of Cruise as Ethan hanging by those wires was one of the most talked about movie scenes of the year. It’s still referenced and memed to this day.

Getting Away With the Jim Phelps Twist

Today, it feels like Mission: Impossible would have a much harder time “getting away” with the Jim Phelps twist without too much of an uproar because the online pile-on and blowback would probably be so much louder and angrier. You see it happen a lot now with a big IP-based movie, where some folks are genuinely upset about something being altered in a new adaptation, even if they didn’t have a personal connection to the source material. This is an example that’s now already 13 years old, but I directly recall the over-the-top fury about the Mandarin twist in Iron Man 3 including people writing variations of “I didn’t mind it at first, but then I heard that’s not what happened in the comics and that sucks!” as though they should be upset by osmosis. I have a feeling it would go that way with Jim Phelps being made into a bad guy today. A small group of Mission: Impossible TV show fans would be legitimately upset and it would snowball into a bunch of other people screaming about it as though they also knew who Jim Phelps was a month before.

Of course, the flip side of this is acknowledging that, yeah, it was pretty crappy to sell out Phelps like that! I think people can generally be far too precious about changes in adaptations, but in this case, I get why this particular change would be so upsetting because it really was altering not just the details about Jim’s backstory, but who he was as a heroic figure.

From my perspective, I mostly just thought Mission: Impossible was a really cool movie and am grateful for it, considering it would turn into an absolutely fantastic staple of an action franchise as the years went on. It’s a shame that last year’s Final Reckoning may have ended things – should it really be the finale – on an uncharacteristically weak note, but it was notable how one of that film’s problems was trying too hard to connect back to the franchise’s past. That included a very clumsy reveal that Shea Whigham’s Jasper Briggs (get it with his last name??) was actually Jim Phelps’ son, in what seemed like a half-hearted attempt to suddenly once more address Ethan Hunt killing Mission: Impossible’s original hero so long ago.