The actors from the original Mission Impossible hate Tom Cruise's saga and it makes perfect sense

Perhaps not everyone knows this, but the Mission: Impossible series includes more than just films starring Tom Cruise. It began with a TV series in 1966, which then returned in 1988 with two seasons. It told the story of a fictional spy agency known as the Impossible Missions Force (IMF).

The nine-season production was the inspiration for the Tom Cruise films, which unfortunately didn’t meet with the approval of the actors from the Mission: Impossible TV series. The cult action movies, which grossed billions of dollars, were criticized by the actors from the original TV show, who didn’t like the direction their characters took. They resent the filmmakers for how they were treated after their TV series started it all.

The original Jim Phelps was disappointed with how his character was treated in the movies

Jim Phelps is a character who appeared not only in the Mission: Impossible films, where he was played by Jon Voight, but also in the TV series, where he was played by Peter Graves. In the movies, Phelps is one of the main antagonists, who turns out to be a traitor. He grew tired of saving the world without thanks or rewards, so he turned against his own people and killed most of the IMF team, before dying himself in a helicopter crash.

In the TV series, Phelps was the heroic leader of the IMF. No wonder his actor didn't like how his character was treated in the films, which he commented on in an interview with CNN shortly after the premiere of the first film (via Espinof).

The Mission: Impossible movies met with opposition from the stars of the original

But Graves wasn't the only actor to express his dissatisfaction with what had been done to his character in the Cruise movies. Martin Landau, who played Rollin Hand, also spoke critically about them during interview with MTV. More than 10 years after release of the first movie, the actor didn’t mince his words when describing his disgust at how the film's writers wanted to bring in the stars of the TV series only to kill off their characters on screen one by one.

When they failed to bring in the actors from the TV show, they changed the names of the agents on Phelps' team and killed off new characters. Nevertheless, the distaste remained, as Landau criticized the films even after all this time.

Although the stars of the TV series didn’t like the films starring Tom Cruise, the audience took a different approach and loved the productions, which became a huge hit and one of the highest-grossing series in the history of cinema.

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