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A Mission: Impossible Retrospective

Sometimes it’s true what they say: you never know what you have until it’s gone. And while, in this exact moment, we still have Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning in the theaters, it has been set up to be the last installment in the iconic franchise. When I went to see it in the theaters on Memorial Day, I didn’t anticipate walking out of the theater feeling solemn or contemplative: it’s an action movie after all, and the eighth one in a series at that. We’ve had thirty years of Tom Cruise taking on more and more apocalyptic stakes and always coming through for us, with Luther Stickell and some other high-profile actors filling in the rest of his IMF team. The series has always been self-aware and never took itself too seriously, and neither did its fans; we always knew we were in store for an absolutely outrageous stunt (like scaling the tallest building in the world or hanging on to a cargo plane as it takes off) and somebody or something trying to take over the world or destroy it entirely. Part of what always made the movies so fun was walking out of it thinking, “What will they do next?” But this time, supposedly, we don’t have that light at the end of the tunnel anymore. There has been no official word on whether Tom Cruise will be returning for a ninth Mission: Impossible or not, but The Final Reckoning really felt like closing the book on the most successful action franchise of all time.1

Back to my solemnity: it had never really hit me until the final credits rolled that in all likelihood, we will never see Ethan Hunt save the day for us again. There is always the possibility that in a few years when the Academy Awards start handing out the award for Achievement in Stunt Design that Cruise and his team decide to run it back one more time so he can finally get his Oscar; Paramount Pictures could also continue to struggle to make money and make Cruise an offer he can’t refuse to lace the boots up one more time. I think the most likely outcome is that Cruise is indeed done making Mission: Impossible movies, but we might reboot the franchise with a new actor and new character working for the IMF a la James Bond or The Bourne Legacy. Okay sorry I keep getting sidetracked here. It just hit me and made me a little sad thinking about how we are done watching this character that has been a big part of our lives for thirty years! I liken it to when a legendary athlete finally retires after a long and illustrious career, or your favorite band announces they are going their separate ways. Watching Kobe Bryant’s last game in 2016 was really fun and exciting and he scored 60 points because why wouldn’t he, but after the final buzzer sounded, I definitely felt a little sad knowing it was the last time I’d see Kobe in a Lakers jersey after twenty years in the NBA. Neither event was profound enough to make me cry or feel sorrow, but they both hit me a little harder than I thought they would. I think that is just a testament to the movies and moments that Tom Cruise has given us in those thirty years as Ethan Hunt, and I am going to miss watching him risk his life for my entertainment.

In order to do this retrospective justice, we need to start all the way back at the beginning in 1992, when Tom Cruise founded his own production company; Paramount Pictures had the rights to the Mission: Impossible television show and had been trying to turn it into a movie for a long time. Cruise decided that he would make it happen as the first feature film for his production company, because he felt like they could turn it into a franchise with him as the tentpole. Cruise had the novel idea of getting a different director for every consequential film, to give each film their own flair and taste – and that is exactly what happened for the first five installments. Cruise worked with Brian De Palma, John Woo, JJ Abrams, Brad Bird, and Christopher McQuarrie on each of the first five movies before deciding to keep McQuarrie around as the other tentpole in the series for the back half of the lineup. Each film did really well in allowing their director to give it their signature look and feel, while still staying true to the storytelling of the IMF and Ethan Hunt as its top agent. We’ll break each film down a little more in a bit, but I will say here that going through and rewatching all of these films in the lead up to the release of The Final Reckoning was truly such a time capsule for action movies in the US. The series has also been host to some of the biggest names in Hollywood jumping on board to help (or hurt) Ethan Hunt’s impossible missions. Just take a look at this list of names who have appeared in the Mission: Impossible franchise:

  • Tom Cruise
  • Ving Rhames
  • Jon Voight
  • Jean Reno
  • Emilio Estevez
  • Anthony Hopkins
  • Thandie Newton
  • Brendan Gleeson
  • Billy Crudup
  • Henry Czerny
  • Simon Pegg
  • Michelle Monaghan
  • Philip Seymour Hoffman
  • Maggie Q
  • Keri Russell
  • Laurence Fishburne
  • Aaron Paul
  • Jeremy Renner
  • Paula Patton
  • Léa Seydoux
  • Josh Holloway
  • Anil Kapoor
  • Tom Wilkinson
  • Rebecca Ferguson
  • Sean Harris
  • Tom Hollander
  • Alec Baldwin
  • Henry Cavill
  • Angela Bassett
  • Vanessa Kirby
  • Hayley Atwell
  • Pom Klementieff
  • Cary Elwes
  • Holt McCallany
  • Nick Offerman
  • Hannah Waddingham
  • Tramell Tillman

Lest we forget that the films have also had such composers as Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, Michael Giacchino, and Lorne Balfe. Needless to say, star power was never going to be an issue for Mission: Impossible.

Let’s take a slightly deeper look into each film and how they each left their own lasting impact on the franchise.

Mission: Impossible (1996)

  • Release date: May 22, 19962
  • Budget: $80 million
  • Box office: $457.7 million
  • Run time: 110 minutes (1 hour, 50 minutes)
  • Letterboxd rating: 3.6 ★
  • My Letterboxd rating: 4.0 ★
  • Rotten Tomatoes: 65% (Fresh)
  • Director: Brian De Palma (Carrie, The Untouchables, Scarface)
  • The Stunt3: Tom Cruise dangling from a trapeze in a highly-secured vault within Langley

The OG. The one that started it all. The best of the bunch (until it wasn’t). Rarely do you have a franchise kick off with a stinker of a movie: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, The Bourne Identity, The Matrix. All certified bangers, and they needed to be in order to give the franchise the juice that it needed to keep going. I haven’t seen a single episode of the original Mission: Impossible show, so I can’t really speak to how “true to the book” this movie is, but it is one of the more rewatchable movies I’ve ever seen. It never gets old, 33-year-old Tom Cruise is incredibly charismatic throughout (and great at some sleight of hand I might add), and there are plenty of rubber face masks to boot. Danny Elfman crushes with the score, we get the iconic CIA black vault heist scene, and we introduce the “spy who is framed for going rogue but it’s actually a different agent who went rogue instead so now he has to fight off both the real rogue agent bad guy and the American government who think he is the bad guy” blueprint for the entire franchise that definitely doesn’t have diminishing returns. De Palma was a great choice to spearhead the kickoff for the Mission: Impossible machine, and you can feel his lasting impact on it. De Palma is best known for his work in the suspense, crime, and psychological thriller genres. We can directly see all three of those at work in this movie with it being a mix of a whodunnit, a spy movie, and a typical action thriller. This movie is criminally low on Rotten Tomatoes if you ask me, but apparently that was par for the course when this movie came out – it was nominated for multiple Razzie/bad awards for poor writing, bad dialogue, and basically people being annoyed that it made over $100 million in the box office because it wasn’t “cinema.” Losers.

Mission: Impossible II (2000)

  • Release date: May 24, 2000
  • Budget: $120-125 million
  • Box office: $546.4 million
  • Run time: 124 minutes (2 hours, 4 minutes)
  • Letterboxd rating: 2.6 ★
  • My Letterboxd rating: 2.0 ★
  • Rotten Tomatoes: 57% (Rotten)
  • Director: John Woo (Face/Off, A Better Tomorrow, The Dragon Tamers)
  • The Stunt: Tom Cruise straight up free solo climbing at Dead Horse Point State Park in Moab, Utah4

Ah yes, my least favorite (by far) entry in the franchise. Part of this is a stylistic difference, but most of it is just that it is really poorly written. For one, the overarching plot is really thin – an IMF agent has gone rogue and created an elaborate pump and dump scheme in which he starts a pandemic so that his stock in the company that makes the cure will go up. I personally think that Dougray Scott was a poor choice in casting for the role of rogue IMF agent Ambrose, and Thandie Newton was handed absolute garbage for her character throughout the entire film. They take the “damsel in distress” role way too far and kinda don’t even hide the fact that she is literally just being used by the IMF and Ethan as a sexual object and means to an end? Gross. Also, Brendan Gleeson is not in this for nearly long enough. Woo’s imprint on the series was certainly supposed to be his knack and fame for “gun fu” and highly stylized imagery and action scenes, but the complete lack of depth and substance in the script leaves viewers wanting a lot more. This movie is arguably the biggest epitome of the year 2000 though, with lots of slow-mo, doves flying, leather, motorcycles, women having no choice but to fall in love with the main character, and entire shots being dedicated to a guy putting on a really douchey pair of sunglasses. Credit has to be given to John Woo though – the action in this movie is incredibly fun to watch and the fight choreography is really cool (including two dudes straight up jousting on motorcycles). It just sucks that all of that is surrounded by really poorly written dialogue and our protagonist being more sexually charged than Jamie Dornan in Fifty Shades of Grey.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

  • Release date: May 5, 2006
  • Budget: $150-186 million
  • Box office: $398.5 million
  • Run time: 126 minutes (2 hours, 6 minutes)
  • Letterboxd rating: 3.4 ★
  • My Letterboxd rating: 4.0 ★
  • Rotten Tomatoes: 73% (Fresh)
  • Director: JJ Abrams (Lost, Alias, Star Wars: The Force Awakens)
  • The Stunt: Tom Cruise base jumping off of a skyscraped in Shanghai into a fulcrum swing which lands him on the roof of another skyscraper

You always remember your first – I don’t have a vivid memory of seeing this in the theaters like I do with other movies, but I know for sure that this was the first Mission: Impossible movie that I saw in the theaters, so the nostalgia alone will always keep this one very high on my list. I asked for the DVD for Christmas that year, and I still have it to this day almost twenty years later. A lot of the flack that this movie caught was due to JJ Abrams’ style of shooting in a very shaky, handheld style which can cause a lot of viewers to get confused or even nauseous. I personally enjoy it and feel like it adds to the real life feeling of it, and like you are right there in the action. Some people also didn’t love how this movie was the first to really humanize Ethan Hunt and have the climax of the film revolve around him trying to save his wife – again, I personally enjoyed it and think it was a step in the right direction for the character. Michael Giacchino took over the scoring for this film and provides my second-favorite score for the entire franchise, adding a little bit of a jazzy feel to it like we’ve seen him do in projects like The Incredibles. I liked the fact that the MacGuffin for this film is pretty undefined, and we never actually find out what it is or why Owen Davian ever wanted it; not everything has to be so neatly and precisely defined! The big star of the film though is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s masterful performance as Davian, which most MI fans would agree is by far the best villain of the entire franchise. Not only did PSH knock it out of the park with his reserved yet sociopathic performance, but the character itself was actually written really well. Until this point the villains of the previous movies were fairly flawed, but Davian had a specific purpose and drive behind his actions, and he truly would stop at nothing to get what he wanted (without it being so grandiose as to infecting an entire city with a deadly pandemic). Don’t get me wrong – this movie has its flaws and is pretty far down on most people’s lists, but it will always have a special place both in my heart and on my rankings.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)

  • Release date: December 16, 20115
  • Budget: $145 million
  • Box office: $694.7 million
  • Run time: 133 minutes (2 hours, 13 minutes)
  • Letterboxd rating: 3.7 ★
  • My Letterboxd rating: 3.5 ★
  • Rotten Tomatoes: 94% (Certified Fresh 🍅)
  • Director: Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille, The Iron Giant)
  • The Stunt: Tom Cruise free solo climbing the effing Burj Khalifa, aka the tallest building in the world

As I mentioned in my Letterboxd review, this seems to be the one where things take a turn, but I still can’t fully put my finger on what it is that makes the next three installments some of the best. Christopher McQuarrie was brought in during production for a bunch of rewrites and would eventually go on to co-write and direct the rest of the series moving forward – I think he had a big hand in understanding how to better write not only the character of Ethan Hunt, but for Tom Cruise the actor as well. It’s like how Kobe Bryant was so good for the Lakers, and they had a lot of success with him, but everything just clicked into place for him when they traded for Pau Gasol – they had an unmatchable chemistry on the court that translated into two championships and one of the best one-two punches in the 21st century NBA. Similarly, Cruise was incredibly successful already as Ethan Hunt, and the Mission: Impossible movies weren’t going anywhere; once Cruise and McQuarrie linked up, there was no turning back. But we still need to talk about the director for this movie, Brad Bird – what a weird choice for him to direct this film. His previous feature film directing consisted of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille; three incredible films, but all of them obviously animated and not live-action. Bird has since only directed one other live-action film before moving back to the animated world where he is currently working on Incredibles 3. It is such an out-of-left-field line on his resume, but it worked really well for him. Jeremy Renner was brought in as a supporting role but with some hidden agendas; if Cruise ever decided to leave the franchise, Renner was cherry picked to be Cruise’s replacement as our IMF hero. As a quick side note, I think it is kinda funny (and a little sad) that Renner was chosen as the successor in two separate franchises (Mission: Impossible and The Bourne Legacy) and both times the audiences (and lead actors being replaced) where like “Nah that’s okay, we like the original guy better.” Another thing that I think helps flip the switch here is Tom Cruise potentially having a mid-life crisis. He was 49 when they made Ghost Protocol, and there is a clear distinction of this movie starting a trend for the remainder of the series to have Cruise perform an absolutely mind-boggling stunt that they build the story around. We had some pretty cool/big stunts and set pieces in the previous three films, but nothing really comes close to free solo climbing (with a wire) the tallest building in the world. Ghost Protocol has more grit, better humor, and bigger set pieces than the rest of the previous films, which makes for a very fun watch.

Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

  • Release date: July 31, 2015
  • Budget: $150 million
  • Box office: $710.9 million
  • Run time: 131 minutes (2 hours, 11 minutes)
  • Letterboxd rating: 3.7 ★
  • My Letterboxd rating: 4.0 ★
  • Rotten Tomatoes: 94% (Certified Fresh 🍅)
  • Director: Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects (writer), Edge of Tomrrow (writer), Jack Reacher)
  • The Stunt: Tom Cruise holding on to a flying Airbus as it takes off, and also holding his breath for six minutes for that underwater sequence

Okay now we’re really digging into what makes for a good Mission: Impossible movie – lots of rubber masks, arguably the most loaded cast to date, multiple insane “this guy is a lunatic” stunts performed by Tom Cruise, and yet another disenfranchised spy gone rogue as the big bad. McQuarrie took all of these things, turned them up to 11, and just let Tom Cruise absolutely cook for Rogue Nation. He took everything that worked from Ghost Protocol and embellished it, while taking everything that didn’t work and (kinda) improving on it. There are still tons of plot holes and this movie really makes you work to suspend your disbelief but also makes the viewers ask themselves, “Isn’t it more fun that way?” And I agree. Sean Harris is a really fun addition to the cast as Solomon Lane, leader of The Syndicate, but not everybody liked him and his portrayal of an ex-MI6 agent who wants to destroy the very system that created him. I think some people just like their big bads to be just that – large in size, trigger-happy, brooding, powerful, and emotional. What makes Lane such a fun villain for me is that he is arguably the antithesis to all of those things – small in stature, withdrawn, reserved, and more discerning than really any other villain to this point. The series takes a little bit of a psychological turn here with Lane wanting to play mind games with Ethan and make him his lab rat that does his bidding as opposed to just sending teams of guys after him with guns and wanting to fist fight him. Up until now, Cruise has had a physical altercation/hand-to-hand fight with every villain, but we never get that in this film. They chase each other around London a couple times, but never actually get physical with each other – in fact, the bad guy is never even hurt in the film; Lane is coaxed into a trap while trying to track down Ethan and is taken away in a glass case to be tried for his crimes by all of the governments that he has targeted. It’s a nice (slight) change of pace to the series that also ratchets up the incredulity and grandiosity of it all without sacrificing any of the thrills or fun that made the franchise so good in the first place.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

  • Release date: July 27, 2018
  • Budget: $178-180 million
  • Box office: $791.7 million
  • Run time: 147 minutes (2 hours, 27 minutes)
  • Letterboxd rating: 4.0 ★6
  • My Letterboxd rating: 4.5 ★
  • Rotten Tomatoes: 98% (Certified Fresh 🍅)
  • Director: Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects (writer), Edge of Tomrrow (writer), Jack Reacher)
  • The Stunt: Tom Cruise HALO jumping out of a plane at 30,000 feet, and also straight up flying a helicopter in a chase scene

We have finally arrived. I mean that in two ways: for one, the franchise has finally arrived with its best installment that (in my mind) is head and shoulders above any other Mission: Impossible movie and for two, we finally get to talk about my favorite MI movie. Fallout came to us in 2018 and was the third straight McQuarrie/Cruise team up for the series, so they were a well-oiled machine at this point. Cruise was 55 years old when they filmed this movie which is just absolutely insane to think about. This was finally the movie where it became unbelievable that Cruise was doing all of this at his age – between the big time stunts like HALO jumping over 100 times or getting a pilot’s license in 12 days and taking 18 months to learn how to fly a helicopter, and the incredible fight scenes like the Paris bathroom one with Liang Yang, nobody in their 50’s should be doing stuff like this. On top of this, or should I say underneath it all, we have an actually really well-thought-out storyline that has real stakes and continuity to it without being too eye-rolly of a MacGuffin. Sure, it ends with Ethan and his team having to simultaneously diffuse three different nuclear bombs in a medical camp while also having to remove a fail-safe on the detonator but let me have this one. Having Cavill play Walker, the ruthless and burly CIA agent who is the real rogue agent makes it so much more compelling and rewarding when a “grown man in a Halloween mask playing trick-or-treat” actually tricks him into admitting that he is the real John Lark. It once again reuses the “Ethan is framed as a rogue agent so he has to not only fight off the bad guy but also reveal who the true rogue agent is”, but it does it so much better. The action choreography throughout is absolutely tops and gives a lot of diversity too: Ethan has his familiar fighting style of basic fist-fighting mixed with gun skills and agility, Walker has his “I literally just reloaded my fists” style of hard-nosed, bare-knuckle boxing fighting, while Ilsa has her Black Widow red room-esque mix of MMA, kickboxing and BJJ to go with assassin-level gun skills and Lane once again stands back and does his fighting from afar; it is all quite refreshing. Lorne Balfe really dials it in and provides my favorite score of the franchise: it is more militaristic with a lot of snare-drumming and horns, but he also mixes in some really interesting MI theme songs motifs throughout that aren’t on the nose but are fun callbacks. Everyone involved just came together in a way that you don’t see too often and created what I think to be the perfect Mission: Impossible movie – it is not a perfect movie in and of itself, but I don’t think you can make a better movie for this franchise. Huge stunts, nuclear stakes, a loaded cast perfectly executing a really well-written script, a booming score that wonderfully accents the action and emotions throughout, and the fate of an entire population in Ethan’s hands. One of the best action movies ever made.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023)

  • Release date: July 12, 2023
  • Budget: $291 million
  • Box office: $571.1 million
  • Run time: 163 minutes (2 hours, 43 minutes)
  • Letterboxd rating: 3.7 ★
  • My Letterboxd rating: 3.5 ★
  • Rotten Tomatoes: 96% (Certified Fresh 🍅)
  • Director: Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects (writer), Edge of Tomrrow (writer), Jack Reacher)
  • The Stunt: Tom Cruise just casually jumping a motorbike off of a huge cliff and then parachuting down to safety

I think that any movie that was shot between 2020 and like 2022 should have some sort of a hall pass. Not a full -on pardon from any sort of criticism, but they should at least have a disclaimer like “Yeah, but it was shot during COVID” or something like that. Because movies were just really hard to make during that time, and dammit if Cruise didn’t try his hardest to give us the summer blockbuster action movie that we had been missing for basically two years – and I think we need to keep that in mind! When I saw this in theaters I didn’t have much criticism on my mind, because I was simply happy to be back in the theaters eating a tub of popcorn and watching Tom Cruise actively try to kill himself on set for my entertainment. Those rose-tinted glasses have since come off and I had more clarity when watching this again in the leadup to the release of The Final Reckoning, but I still stand by the fact that this is a solid action movie. It had the unenviable job of following up Fallout which at this point is still far and away the biggest box office success for the franchise. It was also public knowledge that this was going to be a two-part movie that was going to wrap up the series forever, which is even more responsibility and pressure on it to be outstanding, and I think it fell short of those specific standards; however, it still succeeds as an entertaining popcorn flick which at the end of the day, is all that Mission: Impossible has ever needed to be. They add some good (Pom Klementieff, Cary Elwes), keep some good (Vanessa Kirby, Lorne Balfe), and also add some bad (Hayley Atwell7, the entire idea of “The Entity” and AI being the main villain) which happens in every installment within the series. It’s business as usual, except that it isn’t because it was made during COVID which really messed with the production of not only this film, but also of The Final Reckoning. I never really like when movies are so “big” that they split them up into two parts, because it kinda just feels like an overt money grab that is a little disrespectful to its audience; they even found the formula that works for continuing a story/plot within this series: Nathan Lane and The Apostles are the big bad in Rogue Nation, but then return (with some help in Henry Cavill) as the big bad again in Fallout, but they are two separate movies and weren’t made as a Part One and Part Two. I think this really worked because it allowed them to each be their own thing while also allowing them to build on what happened in Rogue Nation and continuing to flesh it out in Fallout. With Dead Reckoning, they only had the story for one movie but decided to split it up into two movies which just created a lot of fat that should have been trimmed from the last two movies. The proof is in the pudding: the last two movies have respective runtimes of 163 and 170 minutes, a far way away from the 128-minute average runtime of its predecessors. There is some really cool stuff in this movie – I really really like Pom Klemntieff’s character and was glad to have her back for The Final Reckoning, Cary Elwes is great as a sniveling little rat of a government head, Lorne Balfe kills it once again on the score, the motorbike jump stunt and ensuing train fight/rescue scene is scintillating, and our core four of Cruise, Ferguson, Rhames and Pegg are entertaining as always. I just wish they had the proper time, situation and variables in order to really make this as best as they could.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)

  • Release date: May 23, 2025
  • Budget: $300-400 million
  • Box office: $360.5 million8
  • Run time: 170 minutes (2 hours, 50 minutes)
  • Letterboxd rating: 3.6 ★
  • My Letterboxd rating: 3.5 ★
  • Rotten Tomatoes: 79% (Certified Fresh 🍅)
  • Director: Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects (writer), Edge of Tomrrow (writer), Jack Reacher)
  • The Stunt: Tom Cruise flying a bi-plane around South Africa and then hanging off of it while it continues to fly upside down

I have a lot of thoughts on this movie, and some of them come from me still processing the fact that we will (allegedly) never see Ethan Hunt on our screens again, and that means something to me. Regarding The Final Reckoning on its own, this is a lot of movie – in both length and content. But at the same time, it also felt very lacking? The first hour or so of the movie is just a straight up “this is your life” montage which was fun, albeit almost entirely unnecessary – they played the greatest hits to remind you of all the things that have happened so far in the series, but then spend the next two hours constantly making callbacks and bringing back old characters and MacGuffins in a way that can only be described as overdone. As mentioned earlier, it just felt like there was a lot of fat to be trimmed throughout, which stems from them deciding to turn one movie into two. Obviously production delays and COVID and the SAG-AFTRA strikes all played a significant role in messing this up for them and wanting to originally film these movies back to back (similar to The Lord of the Rings), but at the end of the day they didn’t have much of a story left to tell for The Final Reckoning and in my opinion, it shows. The Entity stuff remains weird, the villain somehow lost all of his aura from Dead Reckoning, and they killed Ilsa Faust off, so she was completely absent from this movie (along with Vanessa Kirby’s character, who they filmed scenes for but cut them from the final edit) which left a big hole. All of that being said though, this movie still rocks and is a really fun theater experience that features two of the coolest, most epic, “How the hell did they even do this??” set pieces in action movie history. Nostalgia and endearment for the franchise help to prop this movie up a bit from being an otherwise lackluster conclusion to a 30-year saga that I may have had too high of expectations for – which I only have myself and Tom Cruise to blame for. Overall, this was a little bit of a letdown for a franchise finale but in the same vein, it is the perfect ode to everything it stood for: Ethan Hunt overcoming the odds, Luther having his back no matter the cost, and a bunch of people wearing rubber masks. I’m not going to sit here and not suggest that you go try to see this movie on the biggest screen possible, if not for the biplane scene alone being worth the price of admission.

In 1992, Tom Cruise started his own production studio and set out to turn the Mission: Impossible television series into a movie franchise in its own right and let me tell you: mission accomplished. In total, they produced eight movies across 29 years, spending over $1.5 billion on production and making just over $4.5 billion at the box office. We’ve seen a laundry list of Hollywood superstars make their way through Ethan Hunt’s life, whether it be as part of his IMF super team, a love interest, or somebody trying to kill him. I have my doubts about whether or not this is actually the end for the Mission: Impossible franchise, but it does seem much more likely that Tom Cruise will be moving on to different projects from here on out. And if that is the case, I will remain very grateful to our movie theater savior for entertaining me at the risk of his own safety one last time.

  1. Okay in all reality it’s probably James Bond, but that doesn’t really count because they’ve had like ten different actors play the guy. ↩︎
  2. For those movie nerds like me – yes, this is the same date that President Sloane wrote on the piece of paper in The Final Reckoning. And yes, I did roll my eyes quite aggressively when I first realized it. ↩︎
  3. A special one-off category for this retrospective – what was the “big stunt” from each individual movie? ↩︎
  4. Okay so techincally he had on a hardness and a very thin wire, but he was just straight up climbing that rockface with no net or anything underneath him. The man is insane. ↩︎
  5. This was the first MI movie to not be released in May. ↩︎
  6. This is the consensus best MI movie ever made, across the board. Critically, commercially, any review site, they all have this as the best one. ↩︎
  7. I don’t dislike Hayley Atwell at all, but I really don’t think she was the right person to cast in this role. I also don’t think she was a very well-written character, and it felt like she was added in solely to overtake what Rebecca Ferguson was already masterfully giving us with Ilsa Faust. ↩︎
  8. This number is accurate as of June 6, 2025 ↩︎