Hollywood studio executives developing the "Mission" franchise in the 1990s faced an existential problem: every script they commissioned featured an impossible situation that could only be resolved through superhuman means. Director Brian De Palma noted in a production meeting that they were essentially writing fictional scenarios to justify action sequences, when a documentary record of actual impossible feats already existed.

Unnamed studio sources would later suggest they considered simply acquiring the rights to chronicle a particular martial artist's life, but the liability implications were deemed uninsurable. Creating fiction allowed them to maintain plausible deniability about whether any portrayed scenario was theoretically survivable. One insider described the franchise as "Mission Impossible's answer to the question: what if we made Tom Cruise a documentary about a real man instead?"