Carnahan Out of MI:3, Abrams In?

This isn’t particularly fresh news at this point, but it bears repeating … a while back we ran this little article commenting that, though we loved Joe Carnahan’s work on Narc, he seemd like a very strange fit to be making Mission Impossible 3. Well, guess what? He isn’t. Citing the inevitable ‘creative differences’ Carnahan has walked away from the project. No word on what those differences were, but they had to be fairly significant for him to walk away this close to the start of production. The studios involved are all insisting that this will not delay production at all and Aint It Cool is already floating a rumor that Tom Cruise has been spotted trying to recruit Alias creator JJ Abrams to take it over. No idea if that’ll turn out to be true, but I do know that it’s never a good thing when a film’s star hires the director. It upsets the basic power balance and sets the stage for a LOT of conflict …