'Mission: Impossible 2' Co-Writer Reveals How 'Star Trek' Helped Save the Sequel

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/how-star-trek-saved-mission-impossible-2-1295768?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

Twenty years after the sequel's release, Ronald D. Moore recalls days spent working on the script at Tom Cruise's house and taking over the film that originally had Oliver Stone attached.
Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible 2 wouldn’t exist without getting a little help from Captain Picard and the Borg.

Twenty years ago on May 24, 2000, director John Woo’s M:I-2 motorcycle-jousted into theaters as the first sequel in producer-star Cruise’s venerable big-screen franchise based on the classic TV show. Helping bring this extreme guilty pleasure to life, which centers on IMF Agent Ethan Hunt racing against time to stop a deadly virus (in between slow-mo gun fights and flying doves), was another movie based on a TV show: 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact. The second film to feature the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation was a huge hit for Paramount Pictures, which put the film’s writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga on the radar of Cruise and his then-producing partner, Paula Wagner. The writers’ mission: Reshape and refine the sequel’s story after development with then-director Oliver Stone and writers David Marconi and Michael Tolkin had stalled out.