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Long before the Mission: Impossible franchise transformed Tom Cruise into a real-life superhero performing unbelievable, life-threatening stunts on a regular basis, the Top Gun actor would repeatedly be connected with comic book superhero possibilities. He was one of the actors attached to play Marvel Studios’ Iron Man before Robert Downey Jr. took on the role, and he and director Sam Raimi were briefly attached to a potential adaptation of DC’s superhero noir comic Sleeper in the early '00s. Even before that, however, he was in line to play an all-new character created by the man who gave the world Deadpool.

As comic book creator Rob Liefeld reminded the world around the release of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, “I worked with Tom Cruise from 1992-1996 on a project that ultimately didn’t happen.” This is what led to Liefeld’s involvement with Marvel’s 1996 Mission: Impossible comic book, if you’ve been wondering.

While neither Liefeld nor Cruise have ever talked in detail about what that project was, this was during a period where the Deadpool and Cable creator was working with a lot of Hollywood talent in an attempt to bring his work to the big screen. In addition to this unnamed project, Liefeld was also working with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment on Doom’s IV, a proposed comic book/movie property where the movie never happened (the comic book was published in 1994, however), as well as with Universal Pictures and Independence Day producers Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich on The Mark, a project that was announced as a Will Smith vehicle back in 1998, but also never made it into production.

Speculation at the time was that The Mark was actually a repurposed version of the Tom Cruise project that never saw the light of day, although that has never been confirmed by any of the parties attached.

While it took a little longer for Rob Liefeld’s work to reach the big screen — Deadpool was part of 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, although he wasn’t really recognizable as Liefeld’s creation until the 2016 R-rated Deadpool hit theaters — there’s a Road Less Traveled appeal to imagining what could have happened if all of his 1990s work had come to fruition. Perhaps we would have had the Liefeld Cinematic Universe, instead of the MCU…! 

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