It’s easy to mistake hubris for ambition. In 2018, Christopher McQuarrie became the first director to make multiple Mission: Impossible movies when he went out and topped his own Rogue Nation with Fallout, arguably the franchise’s critical high watermark and certainly its biggest box office success. Having overcome innumerable obstacles in making that movie and no doubt riding high on accomplishing what no one thought could (or even should) be done, it only took a few months for series star Tom Cruise to announce that McQ would be helming an additional two Missions, to be shot back-to-back. The challenge was set, and so the universe went out of its way to make this called shot as damn near impossible as it could possibly be. Mission had never had a returning director before, now McQ will have made half the series – will that kill the magic? The franchise has thrived thanks to Tom Cruise’s dedication to death-defying stunts – can he keep topping himself as he enters his sixties? Fans like me were nervous, but it turns out those were the least of their problems.
One thing McQ has no bones about admitting is that he does not like developing complete screenplays for these movies, instead apparently choosing to do much of the writing when shooting locations are secured. That seems crazy but it worked for Fallout so what do I know? Plus, it turns out, like the movies, plans only exist to fall apart. Simultaneous production of the sequels began in February 2020 and almost immediately was halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. McQ and Cruise locked down together and retooled the movie during the unplanned hiatus, eventually agreeing with the studio to prioritize making one movie before getting started on the second.
Nicholas Hoult, who was set to play the main villain of the two-parter, left the production due to scheduling conflicts so they created a whole new villain, Gabriel, a more age-appropriate foe for Cruise to be played by Esai Morales. Hoult would not be the only actor who wanted out of the franchise: Rebecca Ferguson was busy with Silo and Dune and Ving Rhames… well, I’m not sure what his deal is but I think maybe he has a health problem or maybe a vaccine and/or quarantine issue. I’m just speculating, but see how those characters are handled in the final movies and then tell me that was always the plan.
As production resumed under strict quarantine protocols, a stunt rig fire jeopardized a shoot that had taken months to prepare and was extremely expensive to recover from. Months later, viral video leaked of Cruise chewing out crew who weren’t following protocol, but this was pre-vaccine so people actually defended him. Sadly, I don’t think the public be as gracious today.
In 2021, McQ shot the most ambitious stunt of his career: a train going over an exploding bridge. It took a lot to make this happen, they had originally planned to do this way back in 2019. The producers found a 110-year-old riveted truss bridge in Poland that had stopped being used in 2016 and was intended for demolition. A deal began to form, but once history and railway enthusiasts found out about the whole exploding idea, they leapt into action. In the era of CGI, why was it necessary to actually destroy real history? The backlash was enough that the bridge was soon registered as a heritage site, one the Polish government had a vested interest in protecting. Suddenly the story was that really only a small, damaged part of the bridge needed to be destroyed and the studio wanted nothing to do with repair costs. Instead, they went and built their own bridge over a quarry in England. When the time came to launch their one and only train into the quarry (I believe the explosion was now entirely digital), many of the cameras shooting it failed or were out of focus. McQ worked with what they got.
Finally, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One was released in July of 2023. This was the summer of Part Ones, with movies like Fast X and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse training audiences to reluctantly accept huge cliffhangers. We were told all these films had sequels basically ready to go, but it turns out that was lie. It was also one year after the staggering success of Top Gun: Maverick, the highest-grossing movie of Tom Cruise’s career, so people thought the demand for Cruise control couldn’t be greater. What I’m trying to say is that, despite everything, on-paper, Dead Reckoning was looking good to go. But instead it unperformed in its first weekend and never got a chance to find its legs, as the very next weekend Barbenheimer began. With Oppenheimer scooping up all the premium format screens, Dead Reckoning ended up as a box office disappointment, but even that story was ignored because Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, another three-hour action epic starring an even older screen legend, was a bigger box office bomb.
Nevertheless, McQ and Cruise were already working on Part Two. Or rather, The Final Reckoning, let’s just forget that whole “part two” thing and hope the audiences do too. And actually, there’s just one problem: it was the summer of 2023 and the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes was about to make everyone shut down for the rest of the year. So they shot whatever they could and then hunkered down, once again unable to make any plans as strikes don’t have scheduled end dates. That’s on the studio, they could have made a deal with the unions just for Mission, but they didn’t. When the strikes ended and production restarted in spring of 2024, it was immediately delayed again when the extremely expensive submarine maneuvering mechanism they were using became jammed. Just about the only thing this movie definitely needed to have was a submarine sequence, since it was clearly set up by the beginning and ending of Dead Reckoning Part One, so filming was pushed back again another few weeks. By the time production wrapped in November 2024, the many delays and problems meant this movie’s budget ended up exceeding the first part, costing somewhere between $300-400 million.
Now it’s 2025 and, to put it lightly, there’s not a lot of confidence in long-term economic stability. The enthusiasm to get out there and spend money that made Maverick a hit in 2022 has faded away. It feels like the only people who are reliably going to the cinema are parents and kids who just need a distraction. So The Final Reckoning, despite releasing to record-setting opening Thursday night previews, went on to become the first Mission to not win its opening weekend, losing to the inexplicable Lilo & Stitch remake. It’s been out for a month now, and The Final Reckoning still hasn’t even beaten Dead Reckoning‘s worldwide box office. It’s hard to say in the era of streaming if that really matters, but it certainly isn’t good news. Does this spell the end for the franchise?
I hope so. Look, I get audiences not showing up. Tom Cruise is a wacko and for a lot of people that is enough to avoid his movies and I can’t really counter that argument. Also, this is a movie about an evil AI destroying the world by using our nuclear arsenals against us and while that’s an old trope, I get why maybe that doesn’t sound fun right now in this particular moment. Also, our attention spans have never been shorter and at nearly three hours, even I can admit this is a five-star action movie wrapped in a 2-and-half-star thriller. But for people like me who love these movies, I gotta say it was really, really cool seeing this on one of the biggest screens I could find.
The first act of The Final Reckoning is all about getting the characters into extremely improbable scenarios and it does that with very silly exposition, competent action, and way, way too many callbacks for anyone to care. They try to do a thing here where they want to convince you everything from the previous movies was all leading to this, like in the extremely disappointing 2015 Bond sequel Spectre. This is way better than that, but it feels forced and I don’t imagine it will work for casual fans really at all. It feels like when someone tells an inside joke and you have to ask them what that means and they say “don’t worry, it’s a long story” but you’re like “no I wanna know” and then they get started and you immediately regret it because the explanation is boring and it’s not like you’re ever gonna tell this joke yourself… But in movie form.
But then Tom Cruise gets to that submarine and holy shit I feel like I stopped breathing for an hour. The submarine was such a called shot that I thought there was no way it could be anything but disappointing. Instead, it was the highlight of the movie, a daring, thrilling, spectacular sequence that surely sits among the greatest not just in Mission, but in all action movies. And then they top it. And I’m not spoiling it for you because it’s what they’ve been advertising since the very first trailer: Tom Cruise hanging off a biplane. This scene, clearly evocative of the helicopter chase in Fallout, dazzles and amuses and amazes and ends in a moment that surely should have killed Tom Cruise.
That thrill is something special, something I cherish, something that is going away. Perhaps more than any other action series in history, Mission: Impossible, with its commitment to having its actors do stunts for real, invites you to wonder how exactly it got made. The funny thing is, most of the time the answer is “they just did it.” Tom Cruise did climb the Burj Khalifa, hang off an airplane during take off, and learn to fly a helicopter in a third of the time most people take to get licensed. It’s hard to imagine the combination of factors that allowed these movies to happen ever happening again. Even with the same team.
So I hope they stop here. Maybe the box office disappointment is a blessing. They’ve never outright said these latest two sequels were meant to be the end, but with this new title and all the full circle moments, it does feel like they were prepared to have run out of runway this time. Good. McQ and Tom Cruise say they have a whole bunch of other movies they wanna do outside of Mission, please do them. Do anything else but a sequel or a spin-off or a tie-in show. Take a bow! I’m grateful for what Mission has been and satisfied with where it all ended up. I don’t need anymore. And, as hopefully all these paragraphs convey, I appreciate just how much work it took to get here.