Tom Cruise has been a movie star since at least 1983, when we got the triple whammy of The Outsiders, Risky Business, and All the Right Moves, but something different happened in 1996: He became a franchise movie star with Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible.
For nearly 30 years now, Cruise has been returning to M: I, sometimes after long breaks and sometimes after short ones, to deliver first-class action cinema while also indulging in a certain Messianic idea that only He, the last remaining movie star (debatable), can save cinema as we know it. But more on that later.
This May we get Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, the film which may or may not be Cruise's curtain call as M: I's resident superspy, Ethan Hunt. The film marks the culmination of decades of work for Cruise and his collaborators, and it's rolling out with all the expected fanfare, complete with Cruise jet-setting around the world to sell his new action spectacular — and the practical stunts it contains — to fans far and wide.
But why are these the movies that Cruise keeps coming back to? Why are action fans so in love with them? And how have they sustained themselves over almost 30 years. Let's break it all down. Light the fuse!
Wait, wasn't Mission: Impossible a TV show?
Yes! Three decades before Cruise took over the story, Mission: Impossible was a very successful spy series created by Bruce Geller. It ran for seven seasons between 1966 and 1973, and then continued with a follow-up series, also created by Geller, which ran for two seasons starting in 1988.
The setup for the show was, and is, simple. It follows members of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF), a team of ultra-top-secret government agents who do exactly what their name implies: take on the missions that no one else can handle. Usually led by spy Jim Phelps (Peter Graves), the IMF team routinely saves the world from threats, all while operating in the shadows. Though it's not as widely watched now, the series gave birth to several immortal pieces of the pop culture lexicon, including its main theme composed by Lalo Schiffrin, and lines like "Your mission, should you choose to accept it," and "This message will self-destruct in five seconds."
Oh, yeah! So, the movies?
Right, so the first Mission: Impossible movie was released in 1996, starring Tom Cruise and Jon Voight and directed by suspense legend Brian De Palma. If you've ever seen images of Cruise in a white room full of bright lights, suspended from wires just inches from the floor, that's the film we're talking about.
The first film is sometimes overlooked by newer fans of the franchise these days, but it's an audacious beginning to this series. Its opening gambit is killing off the characters from the TV show, and it eventually reveals Jim Phelps (Voight), the series' leading man, has betrayed the IMF and must be stopped by — you guessed it — Ethan Hunt, the new face of the IMF. It is a literal out with the old, in with the new transition. Like most of Cruise's films from that era, it was a box office success, which meant sequels would no doubt follow.
How many Mission: Impossible sequels are there?
A lot! Well, not a lot by, say, James Bond standards, but by any other metric. We've run through a lot of Ethan Hunt adventures over 29 years.
The Final Reckoning marks the eighth Mission: Impossible film, and the seventh sequel since follow-up movies began to roll out 25 years ago. The first two have your basic action movie sequel names, simply adding a number to the end of the title, but the latter-day sequels, which started to evolve the series with bigger and bigger setpieces each time, have much more dramatic titles, all building to The Final Reckoning.
OK, so eight movies is a lot. What order do I watch the Mission: Impossible movies in?
Well, you want to be sure to go in chronological order here for the biggest impact, and that's especially true of the last four films. The first four are a bit more standalone. Here's the basic layout:
Mission: Impossible (1996): After his team is destroyed, Ethan Hunt must track down a rogue IMF Agent and prove himself to his superiors.
Mission: Impossible 2 (2000): Featuring a soundtrack that includes songs by Metallica and Limp Bizkit, and Cruise with a regrettable haircut, this is one of the most Year 2000 movies ever made. Directed by the legendary Hong Kong action filmmaker John Woo, it follows Hunt as he tracks down yet another rogue IMF Agent who's hoping to get rich by starting a pandemic and then selling the antidote for a boatload of cash.
Mission: Impossible III (2006): Hey look, it's the feature directorial debut of J.J. Abrams, who got the gig because Cruise watched a bunch of Alias episodes! This time around, Ethan's engaged to a wonderful woman named Julia (Michelle Monaghan) who doesn't know he's a spy. But uh-oh — she's been kidnapped by a ruthless arms dealer (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who's brokering the sale of a mysterious object with global consequences! Can Ethan be a spy and also a happily married family man? (Spoilers: Probably not!)
MIssion: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011): Ethan and his team have to infiltrate the Kremlin for a top-secret mission but, oh no, the building blows up and they get framed for it! Disavowed by their country and their agency, the IMF crew has to work to stop a potential nuclear war all while they're being pursued by agents of both the United States and Russia! It's also a rare live-action directorial effort from Brad Bird, and features one of the series' most famous stunts.
MIssion: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015): Ethan has a theory that a "rogue nation" made up of presumed dead intelligence operatives from around the world is launching a global conspiracy to destroy the current world order, but no one believes him but his closest friends. Once again forced to operate outside the purview of his superiors, Hunt sets out to do all kinds of crazy stunts on the hunt for an ultra-scary guy named Solomon Lane (Sean Harris, the best villain in the series).
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018): Widely considered to be the best of the franchise, Fallout follows Ethan as he realizes that, even after he defeated and captured Solomon Lane, his dream of world peace following global destruction lives on, so much so that Lane's crew has their hands on three plutonium cores to make nuclear bombs! It's up to Ethan and his crew to stop him, and things get personal when Hunt realizes his ex-wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan's back, yay!) is caught in the crossfire.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023): Released rather late due to pandemic delays, Dead Reckoning was originally titled Dead Reckoning Part One, and was billed as the first half of the ultimate, perhaps concluding, Mission: Impossible story. Is that true? We'll have to wait and see The Final Reckoning to find out!
Hold on, hold on, that is a lot of information you just dropped on me! You mentioned a team? Does Ethan have the same team for all of these movies?
Yes and no! Apart from Cruise himself, only one actor has appeared in every single Mission: Impossible film in one capacity or another. That honor belongs to Ving Rhames, who plays a tech expert named Luther who often serves as the voice in Ethan's ear during missions. Luther's a legend, Ethan's dear friend, and a guy who can get you out of scrapes in a hurry.
But since Mission: Impossible III, Luther hasn't been alone. That's when Ethan meets Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), another tech expert with dreams of being an IMF Field Agent. Way more jittery than Luther, Benji's eagerness to prove himself gets him into trouble as he follows Ethan to Hell and Back, but we love him, because, hey, it's Simon Pegg! He's been a part of every movie since.
In the first four films, Hunt also got a rotating cast of attractive leading ladies to serve as allies and foils, including Emmanuelle Beart in 1996, Thandiwe Newton in 2000, Michelle Monaghan in 2006, and Paula Patton in 2011. With Rogue Nation in 2015, though, the series got another of its best supporting characters: MI6 Agent Ilsa Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson, who was a key player in both Rogue Nation and Fallout, and a supporting player in Dead Reckoning. Also, since Dead Reckoning, Ethan's been hanging out with master thief Grace, played by Hayley Atwell.
But these are certainly not the only stars attached to Ethan Hunt! Over the course of the series, Cruise has teamed up with everyone from Emilio Estevez (in the first film), to Jeremy Renner (in the fourth and fifth), to Alec Baldwin (in the fifth and sixth), to Vanessa Kirby (in the sixth, seventh, and eighth).
That's a lot of famous people! You also said something about stunts?
This is, arguably, the thing that's put the latter-day Mission: Impossible films in a different class of action cinema hype, because Cruise can't let one of these films go by without doing some kid of wild stunt that, as the cameras clearly show, he's doing by himself, without a double, often in extreme danger. This started with that famous wire sequence in the first film, and progressed to things like rock climbing and motorcycle chases in the second. Beginning with Ghost Protocol, though, the stunts became centerpieces not just of the narrative, but of the marketing for each movie.
So, what kind of stunts are we talking about? Well, in Ghost Protocol, Cruise climbed the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. In Rogue Nation, he hung from the side of a plane as it took off and learned to hold his breath for eight minutes to do an intense free-diving sequence. In Fallout, he flew a helicopter above and through mountains and HALO jumped over Paris. And of course, in Dead Reckoning, he jumped a motorcycle off a cliff and then parachuted down.
These stunts are eye-catching, but they're also central to Cruise's personal mission of making these films movie experiences you must see to believe, preferably in a movie theater.
Cruise is super dedicated to this! Why is this the only franchise he's ever carried this long?
Cruise is not, by and large, a sequels guy. Looking at his career, apart from the aborted Dark Universe project that kicked off with 2017's The Mummy and the massive success of Top Gun: Maverick, he doesn't tend to get wrapped up in follow-ups that much. He does a story, closes that book, and moves on to the next thing. But the Mission films are special.
Why? Well, for one thing, the first film in the series marked Cruise's debut as a producer, and he's produced every one of them since. Cruise isn't a director, so producing these movies puts him in the driver's seat in ways few of his other projects have. He can shepherd the direction of these movies, oversee every bit of their development, and put as much or as little of himself into them as he likes. So as much as he has what you might consider a magnum opus, it's Mission: Impossible. And that connection has certainly evolved and grown over time, as we've seen through his collaboration with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie on the last four films in the series.
These are, to put it bluntly, films that have been there for Cruise in the darkest times of his career, including his controversial romance with Katie Holmes, his even more controversial public criticism of psychiatry and endorsement of Scientology, and beyond. These are problems he cannot always solve or escape, and so he plays a character in Ethan Hunt who always manages to pull out the win.
Pop psychology? Maybe, but there's no denying he cares deeply about these movies, and he's used Ethan Hunt as a stand-in for himself and his goals for the future of cinema — i.e. an occasion that compels people to visit theaters — for years.
That's heavy, man. So, what do I need to know going into The Final Reckoning?
First, let me offer what might be a frustrating caveat: Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning are billed as a possible sendoff for the Ethan Hunt character, and as such they're structured both as a new epic story and as a trip down memory lane for fans of the franchise. So to get the full picture, you really should watch all seven previous films so you can catch everything.
That said, here's what you basically need to know and remember from 2023's Dead Reckoning — and SPOILERS ahead, if you haven't seen it yet:
In that film, Cruise is put on the trail of The Entity, a sentient artificial intelligence that's decided it knows best. It's infiltrating financial, security, and intelligence systems around the globe and messing with objective reality in devastating ways, so of course the U.S. intelligence community wants to find it and harness it for themselves, believing that every other nation aware of The Entity is trying to do the same. To do that, though, they need two halves of a single key to access The Entity's controls, and those two halves are now scattered.
So, Hunt goes after the key, but he's not doing it for the sake of his country. He's doing it because he believes that The Entity is too powerful to endure, so if he gets to it first, he'll destroy it rather than handing it over to an intelligence agency. With his new ally Grace (Hayley Atwell) in tow, Ethan, Benji, and Luther set out to find both halves of the key. Globe-hopping, stunts, and mayhem ensue, especially after Ethan discovers that an old adversary from his early days of covert work, Gabriel (Esai Morales), is seemingly working for The Entity.
While pursuing Gabriel, Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) is killed, leaving Ethan mourning and angry. He goes all-out to catch Gabriel and find both halves of the key, and while he succeeds with the key part, Gabriel gets away. Armed with the completed key, Ethan, Grace, Luther, and Benji set out to access The Entity's original control module, still buried in a Russian submarine that went down more than a decade earlier, so they can stop the killer AI once and for all.
So, is The Final Reckoning really, you know, the final reckoning?
Maybe! This two-part story definitely started, at least according to the promotional campaigns, as a sendoff for Ethan Hunt. But if we've learned anything from these movies, it's that Tom Cruise is a madman who will never stop. As recently as at least 2023, he's said he hopes to keep making M: I films into his 80s, citing Harrison Ford's ability to keep playing Indiana Jones as an example worth following.
So, if The Final Reckoning makes as much money as it seems like it will make, Cruise will certainly have the opportunity to keep going, and find more ways to put Ethan Hunt and himself in mortal danger for our entertainment. We'll just have to wait and see.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is in theaters May 23.
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