Is Art for the Artist or the Audience?
“I need you to trust me one last time,” Ethan Hunt says to the President of the United States in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. For months before the film’s release, though, the line – delivered directly to the camera at the end of every trailer – may as well have been addressed to the audience by Cruise himself. It’s hardly different from the prerecorded message that played before my screening, in which Cruise – again speaking directly to the camera – thanked the audience for coming to see the film on the big screen, concluding with an earnest, “We made it for you.”
Should art be made for the audience, though? Or should it be made for the artist? The question does not admit of an easy answer, and the way I have formulated it as an “either/or” here is, of course, a false dichotomy. In any kind of relationship, people who only care about themselves and give no thought to how others perceive them tend to be insufferable – but the same is true of people who give no thought to themselves and only care about how others perceive them. The question bears probing, and after mulling it in the back of my mind for many years, I found it stirred up afresh by The Final Reckoning.
In this 2023 interview with Letterboxd, the film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, speaks about the unusual way he learned his craft: by watching an audience watch movies while working as a security guard at a theater.
“I just know that I've always been extremely focused on the audience’s experience. I'd say the single most educational experience I ever had was working at a movie theater as a security guard for years, and my job working in that movie theater was to stand in the back of the audience and make sure fights didn't break out. It was a pretty rough neighborhood. For four years that I was working that theater, I was watching the audience while they were watching movies, and that was my film school. It really helped to draw my sense of a connection to how the audience was connecting to the movie. They were vocal and you could just feel it. You could feel when the movie was working and when it wasn’t, and it helped me to develop an innate sense of how the audience is responding to what it is I'm trying to do. And what Tom and I talk about all the time in making movies is, the real magic comes from being able to step outside yourself and be the audience. I don't assume that you're feeling what I want you to feel. I have to be able to step back from it and look at it and say, ‘If I was not making this movie, what effect did I really create?’”
It’s a good story and an admirable philosophy, and it seems clear that director and star are on the same page: for both Cruise and McQuarrie, the first and foremost goal is to connect with the audience. I think this approach is evident in their collaborations, and it has certainly paid off in the past. 2018’s Fallout, the second Mission: Impossible Cruise and McQuarrie made together, is one of the most crowd-pleasing new movies I’ve seen in recent memory; I still remember a friend literally whooping and hollering as he emerged from the theater.
However, I wonder if the last two Mission: Impossible films – 2023’s Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning – testify to the limits of prioritizing audience response above all else. In a recent interview with Josh Horowitz, McQuarrie responded to the question of whether the relatively mixed reaction to Dead Reckoning affected the production of its immediate sequel:
“Oh, yes, because we take all that stuff very very seriously… I'm not one to sit there and say, ‘Ah, the audience didn't get it.’ That's a copout. You work for [the audience]. And I said, ‘OK, what didn't work for them and why?’ ... We looked at the film very very critically and said, ‘OK, where could we have gone better, where could we have done better, how could it have been tighter, how could it have been simpler?’ And it could have been, at the expense of other things that were important to us.”
McQuarrie’s philosophy in this 2025 interview is remarkably consistent with what he expressed in the 2023 interview: the audience’s response is what matters most. In fact, what the audience wants matters more than what the artist wants (“it could have been [better] at the expense of other things that were important to us”).
But here’s the rub: Dead Reckoning is unambiguously my favorite Mission: Impossible, and The Final Reckoning is, equally unambiguously, the weakest of the franchise’s four Cruise-McQuarrie collaborations. And I think this reveals that, ultimately, I am inclined to evaluate art by a slightly different metric.
If McQuarrie had been watching from the back of my theater the first time I watched Dead Reckoning in 2023, he may well have been disheartened. I didn’t respond to it as immediately and viscerally as Fallout. The irony, though, is that if McQuarrie only saw my initial response to Dead Reckoning, he would not have seen the way it continued to grow on me for weeks after that comparatively unspectacular first viewing. Nearly two years later, I have thought more about Dead Reckoning, and found myself more predisposed to rewatch it, than any other Mission: Impossible movie. (Incidentally, this relationship with the film was part of what prompted my very first Substack post.)
The other, sadder irony is that The Final Reckoning’s determination to be “for the audience” is its greatest weakness. The movie’s early passages, with their extensive flashbacks and scenes of exposition, play like an anxious reaction to the fear that Dead Reckoning lost the audience’s trust. They feel desperate – as if, having appealed to moviegoers to trust him “one last time,” Cruise feels the compulsion to hold their hands and make sure they don’t feel that trust was betrayed, even if it means betraying his own artistic wants in the process. (“We hate exposition,” says McQuarrie in the Horowitz interview.)
I’m reminded – in a final ironic touch – of a line from Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” quoted in Cruise and McQuarrie’s first Mission: Impossible movie, 2015’s Rogue Nation: “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…” The films I love most trust themselves enough to do their own thing and invite the audience to meet them halfway, even though they might lose some viewers in the process. Dead Reckoning strikes me as a film of that sort. As an audience member, I appreciate that Cruise and McQuarrie really, really want me to like The Final Reckoning. But I suspect I would think better of it if they had thought less about me.