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Mission: impossible - dead reckoning part one and part two : release date, trailers, cast & more, we break down the characters, the ensemble cast, the plot, the release date, and more..

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Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to watch Tom Cruise drive a motorcycle off a cliff. The seventh movie in the Mission: Impossible franchise will hit theaters this July, and it looks as though it will continue Cruise’s tradition of putting increasingly jaw-dropping, death defying stunts into each one of these action flicks. But, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will just be the first half of a two-part story, as the title suggests. Ahead of the premiere of the first half of Ethan Hunt’s next mission, we’ve done our own stunt work and gathered up everything you need to know about the Dead Reckoning Part One and Part Two .

When Do Parts One and Two Come Out?

(Photo by Christian Black/©Paramount Pictures)

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One , the seventh film in the Crusie-led film adaptation of the ’60s and ’70s espionage TV series , hits theaters soon, on July 12, 2023. Fans won’t have to wait (that) long for the conclusion, as Part Two is set to premiere slightly under a year later, on June 28, 2024. However, filming on Part Two is currently paused due to the Writers Strike, so it’s quite possible that the release date will be delayed again.

Both movies will be exclusive theatrical releases — and if they’re anything like Top Gun: Maverick , another Cruise movie from Paramount Pictures, the same studio behind Mission: Impossible , they won’t be streaming for a while. Maverick hit Paramount+ more than 200 days after its theatrical premiere.

Were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic, Dead Reckoning would have already been released, as Part One was originally slated for a July 2021 premiere. Delays due to the pandemic and subsequent COVID filming protocols (this is where Cruise’s viral, uh, virus rant originated) pushed the release back to 2022, then eventually to 2023.

Though it’s rare that any franchise ever truly ends, Dead Reckoning Part Two is expected to be the end of the franchise — at least as it currently exists.

Who’s Directing It?

Christopher McQuarrie , the director who took Mission: Impossible to new heights starting with Rogue Nation , the fifth film in the franchise, returns for both Part One and Part Two of Dead Reckoning . McQuarrie also co-wrote both installments with Erik Jendresen .

Who’s In It?

Tom Cruise first played IMF agent extraordinaire Ethan Hunt in 1996 when the original Mission: Impossible hit theaters. He’ll have just turned 61 when Dead Reckoning Part One premieres, and Part Two will supposedly be his final appearance as the character, some 28 years later.

He’ll be joined by several returning cast members, including Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames as his fellow IMF agents Benji Dunn and Luther Stickell, respectively. Rebecca Ferguson returns as ex-MI6 agent Ilsa Faust, and Henry Czerny returns as former IMF director Eugene Kittridge, a character who hasn’t been seen since the original ‘96 franchise-starter. Vanessa Kirby returns as Alanna Mitsopolis, the black market arms dealer-turned-uneasy ally to Ethan Hunt, as does Frederick Schmidt , playing her brother Zola Mitsopolis.

There are lots of new additions to the franchise as well. Hayley Atwell , best known for playing Peggy Carter in the MCU, joins as Grace, a character McQuarrie described as a “ destructive force of nature ” with “somewhat ambiguous loyalties” on the franchise-focused Light the Fuse podcast . Ozark’ s Esai Morales plays the film’s primary villain, Gabriel (Morales took over for Renfield star Nicholas Hoult , who dropped out due to scheduling issues), while Guardians of the Galaxy’ s Pom Klementieff plays an assassin who works for Gabriel.

(Photo by ©Paramount Pictures)

Shea Whigham , recently seen in HBO’s Perry Mason , plays Jasper Briggs, an enforcer in a mysterious group known as “The Community” who is attempting to track Ethan Hunt down along with his partner, played by Greg Tarzan Davis . Charles Parnell ( Top Gun: Maverick ), Rob Delaney ( Deadpool 2 ), Indira Varma ( Obi-Wan Kenobi ), and Mark Gatiss ( Sherlock ) also star, as does The Princess Bride’ s Cary Elwes in an as-yet undisclosed role.

Recent Oscar-winner Angela Bassett , who played CIA director Erika Sloane, was originally supposed to reprise her role but couldn’t due to COVID travel restrictions.

The cast for Part Two hasn’t fully been revealed, though it’s probably safe to assume that most of the major actors from Part One will appear once more, assuming they survive the first movie. We do know, however, that Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham will join the ensemble, as will Parks & Rec’ s Nick Offerman , who plays Sydney, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

What Is Dead Reckoning About?

Candidly speaking, the plots of the Mission: Impossible movies aren’t really their main appeal. They tend to be slick, serviceable MacGuffin chases that are an entertaining framework for banter and Tom Cruise’s insane stunts. But we do have some idea of what to expect from Dead Reckoning Part One . Here’s the official synopsis from Paramount:

“In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One , Ethan Hunt and his IMF team embark on their most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands. With control of the future and the fate of the world at stake, and dark forces from Ethan’s past closing in, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan is forced to consider that nothing can matter more than his mission — not even the lives of those he cares about most.”

Tracking down a weapon that threatens humanity before the bad guys get it? Dark forces from Ethan’s past? A deadly race around the globe, and a mysterious enemy? This is, in other words, pretty standard spy movie stuff, but few franchises are capable of pulling it off with as much style as Mission: Impossible . No specifics for the plot for Part Two have been revealed, so as not to spoil Part One , but it’s probably safe to say it won’t deviate too far from the tried and true formula, even as it serves to wrap up loose ends from  Part One .

How Long Will It Be?

Part One is on the longer side. Without credits, it boasts a runtime of 2 hours and 36 minutes. The length of Part Two , of course, is TBD.

How Many Trailers Are There?

While there have been no trailers for Part Two yet, naturally, there have been a few for Part One . The first , which was light on dialogue, came out in May of 2022, more than a year before the film’s release. The full trailer came out a year later.

While they’re not quite trailers, Paramount also released a trio of behind-the-scenes featurettes, one of which centers on Cruise’s most dangerous and ambitious stunt yet — driving a motorcycle off a cliff and parachuting to safety. It’s wild, and it certainly inspires a deeper appreciation for the work that went into the stunt, but if you don’t want to spoil the majesty of it all, it’s probably best to check it out after you’ve seen the film.

Is Tom Cruise Doing His Own Stunts?

Did you not see the featurette right there? The man drove a motorcycle off a cliff!

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One opens in theaters on July 12, 2023. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two opens in theaters on June 28, 2024.

Thumbnail image by ©Paramount Pictures

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‘Mission: Impossible 7’: Everything We Know About Tom Cruise’s Latest Death-Defying Installment ‘Dead Reckoning Part One’

By Angelique Jackson

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Your mission — should you choose to accept it — is to head to theaters on July 14, 2023 for the long-awaited (and COVID-delayed) seventh installment of Tom Cruise ’s “Mission: Impossible” film franchise.

“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” marks Cruise’s latest outing as Ethan Hunt, an agent of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF), who embarks on an operation which — as the title suggests — promises to be his most dangerous yet.

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In the behind-the-scenes clip, which first debuted for theater owners at CinemaCon in 2021 , Cruise, McQuarrie and the film’s crew demonstrated how they pulled off a stunt where the actor drives a motorcycle up a ramp and off a cliff, leading into a base jump, which was a highlight of the movie’s first trailer.

So excited to share what we’ve been working on. #MissionImpossible pic.twitter.com/rIyiLzQdMG — Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) December 19, 2022

“This is far and away the most dangerous thing we’ve ever attempted,” Cruise said of the stunt, which is billed as the “biggest in cinema history.”

To train for the complicated sequence, Cruise skydived over 500 times and did about 13,000 motocross jumps.

“I have to get so good at this that there’s just no way I can miss my marks,” Cruise explained, reinforcing just how perilous this all is.

“Coming up with the stunt is just one of the technical challenges,” McQuarrie added. “The other is putting a camera in a place where you can see where Tom is doing it — finding the right lens, the right platform, the right medium. Even two years ago, the cameras didn’t exist that would allow us to do what we’re trying to do today.”

Here’s everything you need to know about “Dead Reckoning Part One”:

What does “Dead Reckoning” mean?

The seventh “Mission: Impossible” movie’s title was officially revealed at CinemaCon in April 2021 , and fans immediately wondered what the mysterious phrase might signal for Ethan and the IMF team. “Dead reckoning” is a navigational term, McQuarrie noted in an interview with Empire magazine , where he explained the connection between the phrase and the plot.

“There are many things emerging from Ethan’s past,” the filmmaker told the magazine. “[Dead reckoning] means you’re picking a course based solely on your last known position and that becomes quite the metaphor not only for Ethan, but several characters.”

The film’s first trailer gave a glimpse into exactly which ghosts from Ethan’s past might reappear, beginning with Henry Czerny, who reprises his role as former IMF director Eugene Kittridge for the first time in more than 25 years.

“Your days of fighting for the so-called ‘Greater Good’ are over,” Cherny’s Kittridge tells Hunt at the top of the teaser, which previews all the death-defying action sequences to come.

As the tensions builds, Kittridge continues, serving Hunt with an ultimatum: “This is our chance to control the truth. The concepts of right and wrong, for everyone for centuries to come. You’re fighting to save an ideal that doesn’t exist. It never did. You need to pick a side.”

Cruise has starred in and produced all the “Mission: Impossible” movies, which are based on the 1966 television series created by Bruce Geller and have grossed over $3.5 billion at the box office. While the sequels (2000’s “Mission: Impossible II” and 2006’s “Mission: Impossible III”) used standard-fare Roman numerals to distinguish them, the Brad Bird-helmed fourth film, 2011’s “Ghost Protocol,” bucked that tradition. Then, McQuarrie took over the franchise with the fifth and sixth films, subtitled “Rogue Nation” and “Fallout,” respectively.

“M:I-7” and “M:I-8” were announced In January 2019 with plans to film the movies back-to-back, but the COVID-19 pandemic delays and Cruise’s promotional duties for “Top Gun: Maverick” ultimately scuttled those plans. “Dead Reckoning Part Two,” as it will presumably be called, is currently filming and is scheduled for release on June 28, 2024.

Who’s in the cast?

“Dead Reckoning Part One” follows the events of “Fallout,” where Hunt and his IMF crew saved the world from a nuclear apocalypse amid a series of double-crosses, including a memorable turn from Henry Cavill (as CIA assassin August Walker). The movie was the highest-grossing entry in the franchise, earning nearly $800 million at the box office.

Also returning from “Fallout” are Vanessa Kirby — Alanna Mitsopolis, a black market arms dealer also known as the White Widow — and Frederick Schmidt, as her brother Zola. The siblings are in the family business: Their mother is Max (Vanessa Redgrave), the world-class smuggler Ethan tangoed with in the 1996 original. 

Among the spy thriller’s new players are Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff and Shea Whigham, who all feature prominently in the film’s first footage. Atwell plays a mysterious new character named Grace, while Morales serves as “Dead Reckoning’s” primary villain.

In March 2021, McQuarrie announced that the cast would also include Cary Elwes, Indira Varma, Rob Delaney, Charles Parnell and Mark Gatiss. Rounding out the ensemble are Greg Tarzan Davis (who appeared with Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick”) and Mariela Garriga, both in undisclosed roles. Joining the ensemble for “Mission: Impossible 8” are Holt McCallany, Nick Offerman and Janet McTeer.

COVID Delays

“Dead Reckoning Part One” was initially scheduled to debut on July 23, 2021 before the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the film almost exactly two years. Its release date has changed four times.

The production was one of the first major studio films to resume after the pandemic struck, but its globe-trotting shoot proved to be challenging as COVID cases waned and then surged in many of the half-dozen countries where the movie was set to shoot. As the production pivoted locations, it also shut down approximately seven times, and the budget ballooned to $290 million, which far surpassed the $190 million spent on “Fallout.”

While the cost-increases were unavoidable given the circumstances, Cruise also became the champion of COVID-safety on set in December 2020 after an audio clip leaked to the press of him chastising crew members on location in the U.K. for not adhering to the protocols.

As first reported by The Sun , after Cruise saw two crew members standing too close to one another in front of a computer screen, he told the crew: “We are the gold standard. They’re back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us. Because they believe in us and what we’re doing. I’m on the phone with every fucking studio at night, insurance companies, producers and they’re looking at us and using us to make their movies. We are creating thousands of jobs, you motherfuckers. I don’t ever want to see it again. Ever!”

While the clip was controversial due to Cruise’s obvious frustration, George Clooney was among Cruise’s defenders, telling Howard Stern (via E! Online) that the actor “didn’t overreact because it is a problem.”

Does this mark the end of the line for Ethan?

When news broke that “Dead Reckoning” was planned to be an epic two-part extravaganza, audiences couldn’t help but be reminded of the end of the “Harry Potter,” “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” franchises, which all ended with two-part finales.

In February, sources told Variety that the two films were designed “as a sendoff for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character,” but filmmakers will neither confirm nor deny that this is his swan song.

“I’ve been working with Tom Cruise for 15 years and I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve been standing next to the man, witnessed an event and then read about it in the trades the next day and none of what they describe is actually true,” McQuarrie said when asked directly about the future of the action franchise during an appearance on the “Light the Fuse” podcast.

He added: “You learn to ignore it and laugh at it. In today’s world, you wait 17 minutes and another news cycle will sweep it away.”

Our estimation?

As long as Cruise keeps bringing in the box office bacon, it stands to reason that the impossible missions can — and just might — continue.

… Should he choose to accept them.

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‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’ Review: Still Running

In this franchise’s seventh entry, Tom Cruise’s mission includes increasingly improbable leaps, chases and stunts. Luckily for us, he chooses to accept it.

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By Manohla Dargis

I don’t know if anyone has ever clocked whether Tom Cruise is faster than a speeding bullet. The guy has legs, and guts. His sprints into the near-void have defined and sustained his stardom, becoming his singular superpower. He racks up more miles in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” the seventh entry in a 27-year-old franchise that repeatedly affirms a movie truism. That is, there are few sights more cinematic than a human being outracing danger and even death onscreen — it’s the ultimate wish fulfillment!

Much remains the same in this latest adventure, including the series’ reliable entertainment quotient and Cruise’s stamina. Once again, he plays Ethan Hunt, the leader of a hush-hush American spy agency, the Impossible Mission Force. Alongside a rotating roster of beautiful kick-ass women (most recently Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby) and loyal handymen (Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames), Ethan has been sprinting, flying, diving and speed-racing across the globe while battling enemy agents, rogue operatives, garden-variety terrorists and armies of minions. Along the way, he has regularly delivered a number of stomach-churning wows, like jumping out a window and climbing the world’s tallest building .

This time, the villain is the very au courant artificial intelligence, here called the Entity. The whole thing is complicated, as these stories tend to be, with stakes as catastrophic as recent news headlines have trumpeted. Or, as an open letter signed by 350 A.I. authorities put it last month: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” In the face of such calamity, who you gonna call? Analog Man, that’s who, a.k.a. Mr. Hunt, who receives his usual mysterious directives that, this time, have been recorded on a cassette tape, an amusing touch for a movie about the threat poised to the material world by a godlike digital power.

That’s all fine and good, even if the most memorable villain proves to be a Harley Quinn-esque agent of chaos, Paris (Pom Klementieff), who races after Ethan in a Hummer and seems ready to spin off into her own franchise. She tries flattening him during a seamlessly choreographed chase sequence in Rome — the stunt coordinator, Wade Eastwood, is also a racecar driver — that mixes excellent wheel skills with scares, laughs, thoughtful geometry and precision timing. At one point, Ethan ends up behind the wheel while handcuffed to a new love interest, Grace (Hayley Atwell, another welcome addition), driving and drifting, flirting and burning rubber in what is effectively the action-movie equivalent of a sex scene.

Despite the new faces, there are, unsurprisingly, no real surprises in “Dead Reckoning Part One,” which features a number of dependably showstopping stunts, hits every narrative beat hard and, shrewdly, has just enough winking humor to keep the whole thing from sagging into self-seriousness. This is the third movie in the series that Cruise and the director Christopher McQuarrie have made together, and they have settled into a mutually beneficial groove. On his end, McQuarrie has assembled a fully loaded blockbuster machine that briskly recaps the series’ foundational parameters, adds the requisite twists and, most importantly, showcases his star. For his part, Cruise has once again cranked the superspy dial up to 11.

Over the years, McQuarrie has loosened up the star, who generally seems to be having a pretty good time. Still, it must be exhausting to be Tom Cruise, who famously performs his own stunts. A smattering of creases now radiate around his smile, but time doesn’t seem to have slowed his relentless roll. The most arresting set piece here finds Ethan smoothly sailing off a cliff via a motorbike and a parachute. Improbable, yes? Impossible? Nah. Like the other large-scale, stunt-driven sequences, this showy leap at once underscores Cruise’s skills and reminds you that a real person in a real location on a real motorbike did this lunatic stunt.

Nothing if not a classicist, Ethan also goes one to one with a baddie (Esai Morales) atop a speeding train, perhaps in homage to his cliffhanger moves on another train in the first “ Mission: Impossible ” (1996). In his review, the New York Times critic Stephen Holden observed that with this film Cruise had “found the perfect superhero character.” It’s worth noting that, in 1996, the top 10 movies released in the United States were largely high-concept thrillers and comedies; in 2022, half the top 10 releases were from Marvel or DC. Yet the film that connected most strongly with audiences was Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick.”

Although “Maverick” featured plenty of digital whiz-bangery, its most spectacular draw of course was Cruise, who has also remained the single greatest attraction in the “Mission” movies. To that point, while there’s little of substance that I remember about the first film other than it was directed by Brian De Palma, I can vividly picture — with the crystalline recall that only some movies instill — two distinct images of Cruise-Ethan from it. In one, he races away from a tsunami of water and shattered glass; in the second, he hovers inches above a gleaming white floor, his black-clad body stretched head to toe in a near-perfect horizontal line. The filmmakers imprinted those images on my memory; so did Cruise.

Early in the “Mission: Impossible” series, the outlandishness of the movies’ plots and Cruise’s equally fantastical stunts started to make him seem less than human. By the second movie, I wondered if he were disappearing altogether, turning himself into little more than a special effect. Since then, the plots and the stunts have remained impossibly absurd, sometimes enjoyably so, as here. Yet over the years, the series has unexpectedly made Cruise seem more poignantly human than he has sometimes seemed elsewhere. One reason is that the “Mission” movies were instrumental in shifting the locus of his star persona from his easygoing smile — the toothy gleam of “Risky Business” and “Jerry Maguire” — to his hardworking body.

The obvious effort that Cruise puts into his “Mission” stunts and the physical punishment he endures to execute them — signaled by his grimaces and popping muscles — have had a salutary impact on that persona, as has the naked ferocity with which he’s held onto stardom. It’s touching. It’s also difficult to imagine any actor today starting out in a superhero flick reaching a commensurate fame, not only because the movies, Hollywood’s at least, no longer retain the hold on the popular imagination that they once did, but also because the corporately branded superhero suit will always be more important than whoever wears it. Tom Cruise doesn’t need a suit; he was, after all, built for speed. He just needs to keep running.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One Rated PG-13 for thriller violence. Running time: 2 hours 43 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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The scary question at the heart of the Mission: Impossible movies

In Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise once again leads a franchise that’s all about trickery, subterfuge, and the nature of reality itself.

by Alissa Wilkinson

In the very first scene of the very first Mission: Impossible film, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is interrogating a Russian guy. We don’t know it’s Hunt, though, because — in perhaps the most iconic running bit in the M:I universe — he’s wearing an extremely lifelike rubber mask. Two minutes into the scene, he walks over to the Russian, drugs him till he passes out, and then pulls off the mask, dramatically revealing the face of a slightly flushed and rumpled Cruise. (It’s hot under all that latex.)

Shortly after that first reveal, the walls of the room fall outward into a warehouse, which makes for a bigger reveal: The whole scene was faked. Not only was the now-immobilized Russian hoodwinked, but the audience was tricked into believing their senses. For us, the moment is delightful; for the laid-out man, not so much.

That opening parry for Mission: Impossible, created and produced by Cruise as a spy-action franchise for himself, showed up in movie theaters in May 1996, with Brian De Palma (of Carrie and Scarface ) in the director’s chair. Compared to the latest installment in the franchise, frequent Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One , the 1996 version is much sweatier, darker, and kind of erotic. (A Brian De Palma movie indeed.)

The omnipresent unmaskings , of which there have been at least 15 or 20 by now, are still a mainstay of the films. What’s so great about those reveals, in particular, is that you’re rarely actually expecting them. Dead Reckoning Part One plays with this a little, but for the most part, through all the films, any guy at any time could rip his face off and you’d still be like, “Wow, I did not see that coming.”

The new version is like its predecessors, employing a trope borrowed from the TV show that spawned the film: trickery around every corner, a sense that you can’t quite believe what you see. Dead people turn out to be not-dead people. Walls of rooms keep falling apart to reveal they’re constructed in some warehouse somewhere. Everyone could be a rogue agent or maybe not, and the movie sure isn’t going to wink at you about it till it’s good and ready.

That those twists and turns keep surprising us seven movies in points to what’s truly delightful about the Mission: Impossible franchise, and what makes it, in my opinion, both the most inventive and the most satisfying long-running franchise in Hollywood. On one level, M:I is wonderful because the convoluted plots are pretty much beside the point; if they can be said to have a consistent theme, it is “Tom Cruise likes almost dying on camera.”

And yet once you’ve watched them all, you can detect a kind of meta-theme to the M:I movies. It stems from a simple moviegoing fact: Most of us believe that what we are seeing in a movie is how things actually happened in the world of the movie. It’s why a movie like A Beautiful Mind or Big Fish or The Irishman is so memorably affecting; we are trained to believe our narrators, and when it turns out that what we’ve been watching is not quite what actually happened, it’s thrilling. New meaning emerges from the mismatch.

Mission: Impossible plays on this expectation, though there’s no specific perspectival narrator. The thrill comes from occasionally discovering that what we’ve been watching is an elaborate fake-out. Sleight of hand is everywhere. Don’t trust your senses, Mission: Impossible exhorts us — they’re easily manipulated.

This is underlined, in another meta-heavy way, by what makes the films so distinctive: Cruise’s incredible, literally death-defying stunts, every film seeming to take them to a new level. He climbs up sheer rock walls , leaps across rooftops , fights cliffside , and hangs off the side of a flying Airbus A400M . Each time a new Mission: Impossible movie is released, it’s accompanied with marketing material that mainly leans on explaining that yes, Tom Cruise did actually climb the Burj Khalifa . Personally I, and I suspect Cruise, will not be satisfied until Ethan Hunt is in outer space. (Oh, he’s doing it .)

Why emphasize that he’s actually doing these stunts (albeit with cables and nets — you could never afford to insure the production otherwise) as the lynchpin of the M:I marketing? First, of course, because it is pretty badass. But the second reason is obvious: While action is a mainstay of American cinema, particularly in superhero movies, we all know they’re flying around on soundstages and are CGI’d within an inch of their lives. It’s all spectacle, but with no reality.

With Mission: Impossible , however, our deceiving eyes don’t quite extend to the stunts. Yes, there are tricks of the camera and computer going on. But Tom Cruise is actually driving a motorcycle off a cliff and then plummeting down . That’s real — real enough to gasp and hold your breath and get a little shaky. It’s as much a mainstay of the movie as the mask trickery, and that subtle play with what we’re seeing, with the real and the unreal, suggests the movies might be doing this very much on purpose.

I’d already formed that thought and pitched it to my editor before going into Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One , and about 10 minutes in, I started silently fist-pumping. This movie’s Big Bad is something everyone calls “the Entity,” which is not a person, or even a shadowy cabal of persons, but an AI that’s become sentient and is out to take down humanity.

There’s arguably a tad too much explanation about the Entity throughout the movie that bogs it down a little, but the irony is so bold you sort of have to respect it. At the same time that Hollywood’s workers are battling to make sure their bosses don’t replace them with AI to cut costs and please shareholders, one of the summer’s biggest movies is about how AI wants to wipe us all out. It’s of a piece with recent blockbusters that are straightforwardly about how our digital doppelgangers want to kill us, algorithms are out to destroy originality , and continually repurposing nostalgia IP is how a culture dies . The call is coming from inside the house, et cetera.

But the reason I loved the Entity plotline — which, like most of the characters, will clearly be developed and wrapped up in Part Two (due out next June) — so much is that it shows what Mission: Impossible has been about all along.

Thus the Entity’s greatest threat is its ability to change reality — well, in a manner of speaking. It’s not that the digital threat can change the physical bones of reality. The Entity’s danger to humanity lies chiefly in the fact that the world is fully networked, everyone passing currency and information and even warfare along digital pathways that a sentient AI would have no trouble hacking and manipulating. In a highly mediated world, where we encounter everything and everyone through screens, the way reality is represented to us suddenly becomes, effectively, reality. If a story or a myth is floated around the internet and people come to believe it, does it even really matter, in a practical matter, if it’s true? If, as in the 1964 film Fail Safe , a country’s government thinks it’s under attack and launches a missile back at the supposed aggressor who then counterattacks, how much does it matter to the civilians on the ground that there was never an attack in the first place?

If a story or a myth is floated around the internet and people come to believe it, does it even really matter if it’s true?

This is exactly what the humans of Dead Reckoning fear: that the entity will create reality by manipulating it, and we’ll just wipe ourselves out as a result. It’s a problem that humanity caused, of course, by getting itself so digitally intertwined and creating an AI in the first place. But now it’s out of our hands, and whoever controls it — if it can be controlled at all — is, in effect, God.

All of which weaves seamlessly into the broader Mission: Impossible narrative. What’s impossible about these missions? They’re famously difficult to pull off, with death-defying stunts that require Hunt and his buddies to precisely understand their surroundings, down to the millimeter and the temperature and pull of gravity. It’s thrilling to watch, and thrilling to experience, for sure — but it’s a reality that waits for us. In the future, the way we trust our senses will be radically altered. You know, because you’ve felt it, too.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One opens in theaters on July 13.

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Tom Cruise hangs on for dear life to his 'Mission' to save the movies

Justin Chang

Tom Cruise is back, and doing his own stunts, in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. Paramount Pictures and Skydance hide caption

Tom Cruise is back, and doing his own stunts, in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.

For some time now, Tom Cruise has been on what feels like a one-man mission to save the movies. Back in 2020, when Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One was shooting in the U.K., Cruise was recorded screaming at crew members who'd violated COVID-19 lockdown protocols, all but claiming that the industry's future rested on their shoulders. Earlier this year, Steven Spielberg publicly praised Cruise for saving Hollywood with the smash success of Top Gun: Maverick .

Now, with the box office still struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels, Cruise has become a kind of evangelist for the theatergoing experience, urging audiences to buy tickets not just to his movie, but also to other big summer titles like Barbie and Oppenheimer .

Pop Culture Happy Hour

'mission: impossible' is back, but will you accept it, or will it self-destruct.

Cruise's save-the-movies spirit goes hand-in-hand with his self-styled reputation as the last of the great Hollywood stars. In this seventh Mission: Impossible movie, the now 61-year-old actor and producer still insists on risking life and limb for our viewing pleasure, doing his own outrageous stunts in action scenes that make only minimal use of CGI. And so we see Cruise's Ethan Hunt, an agent with the Impossible Missions Force, or IMF, tearing up the streets of Rome in a tiny yellow Fiat, riding a motorcycle off a cliff and — in the most astonishing sequence — hanging on for dear life after a deadly train derailment.

The plot that connects these sequences is preposterous, of course, but reasonably easy to follow. In an especially timely twist, the big villain this time around is AI — a self-aware techno-being referred to as the Entity. It's an invisible menace, everywhere and nowhere; it can wipe out data systems, control the flow of information and bring nations to their knees.

'Top Gun: Maverick' is ridiculous. It's also ridiculously entertaining

Hunt and his IMF team are determined to destroy the Entity before it becomes too powerful or falls into the wrong hands. But his old boss, Eugene Kittridge, played by the sinister Henry Czerny, warns Hunt to fall in line with the U.S. government, which wants to control the Entity and the new world order to come.

This is notably the first time we've seen Kittridge since Brian De Palma 's 1996 Mission: Impossible — the first and still, to my mind, the best movie in the series. That said, the director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie has done a snazzy job with the most recent ones: Rogue Nation , Fallout and now Dead Reckoning Part One .

Coronavirus Updates

Sorry, tom cruise fans — new 'top gun' and 'mission impossible' movies delayed again.

Here, he seems to be paying sly tribute to that 1996 original, even evoking its horrific early setpiece in which Hunt watched helplessly as his IMF teammates were murdered, one by one. That trauma was formative; it explains why, in movie after movie, Hunt has repeatedly put his life on the line for his friends.

If you're kept up with the series, you'll recognize those friends here, including Hunt's fellow operatives played by Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Rebecca Ferguson. You may also remember Vanessa Kirby , reprising her Fallout role as a ruthless arms broker and giving, in a single sequence, perhaps the movie's best performance. There are some intriguing new characters, too, including a wily thief, well played by Hayley Atwell, who draws Hunt into an extended game of cat-and-mouse. Pom Klementieff steals a few scenes as a mysterious assassin, as does Esai Morales as a glowering enemy from Hunt's past.

That's a lot of characters, double-crosses, chases, fights, escapes and explosions to keep track of. But even with a running time that pushes north of two-and-a-half hours — and this is just Part One — the movie never loses its grip. McQuarrie, a screenwriter first and foremost, paces the narrative beautifully, building and releasing tension at regular intervals.

Compared with the visual effects-heavy bombast of most Hollywood blockbusters, Dead Reckoning Part One feels like a marvel of old-school craftsmanship, just with niftier gadgets. Even Hunt wears his devil-may-care recklessness with surprising lightness and grace, spending much of the movie's third act on the sidelines and even playing some of his most daring escapades for laughs. Not that the actor doesn't take his mission seriously. I don't know if Tom Cruise can save the movies, but somehow, I never get tired of watching him try.

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Tom cruise speeds off a cliff in ‘mission: impossible – dead reckoning: part one’ trailer.

The seventh installment in the billion-dollar action-spy franchise returns familiar faces and sets Ethan Hunt (Cruise) up for more high-octane stunts.

By Jackie Strause

Jackie Strause

Managing Editor, East Coast

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Ethan Hunt’s next mission is going to cost him dearly.

The new trailer for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning: Part On e reveals more of what Tom Cruise has in store when he returns to the IMF agent role he originated in 1996.

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“Your life will always matter more to me than my own,” Ethan tells agents Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). “None of our lives can matter more than this mission,” says Luther, to which Ethan replies, “I don’t accept that.”

The logline for Part One reads: “Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team embark on their most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands. With control of the future and the fate of the world at stake, and dark forces from Ethan’s past closing in, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan is forced to consider that nothing can matter more than his mission — not even the lives of those he cares about most.”

Christopher McQuarrie, who has directed, written or produced a number of Cruise films, directed and co-wrote the script with Erik Jendresen; he also produces with Cruise. Executive producers are David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Tommy Gormley, Chris Brock and Susan E. Novick.

Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Mariela Garriga, Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, Frederick Schmidt, Cary Elwes, Mark Gatiss, Indira Varma and Rob Delaney round out the cast.

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Breaking down the trailer for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt in a teaser for the action sequel. But who are all these people joining him for this latest impossible mission?

Senior Writer

Tom Cruise is back to battle baddies as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (out July 14, 2023), and the teaser trailer for this seventh film in the franchise was released today. Which new characters are joining our hero for his latest extremely difficult task? Which old ones are back from previous adventures? And does it feature the sight of Tom Cruise running? (Spoiler alert: it does!). You can read our full breakdown of the trailer below.

Welcome back to the world of Mission: Impossible!

Directed by longtime Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, the shoot for the new Mission: Impossible film took place in numerous locales, including the U.K., Italy, and Abu Dhabi. The opening moments of the trailer emphasize the globe-trotting nature of the movie as we see horses racing through a desert, a car hurtling through a European street, and a bike being ridden through some beautiful, likely British, countryside. We also see Ethan Hunt getting physical with some goons at the kind of super-cool nightclub that has never actually existed outside of the movies.

The return of Kittridge

The first half of the trailer features the voice of none other than actor Henry Czerny who played the character of Impossible Mission Force director Eugene Kittridge way back in Brian De Palma's original 1996 Mission: Impossible and has now returned to seemingly dissuade Hunt from his impossible mission-completing ways. "Your days of fighting for the so-called greater good are over," Kittridge says. "This is our chance to control the truth, the concepts of right and wrong for everyone for centuries to come. You're fighting to save an ideal that doesn't exist, never did. You need to pick a side."

Introducing the big bad

While Kittridge intones, we are introduced to some of the cast who are joining the franchise this time around including Esai Morales, who appears to be playing the film's villain (or one of them, anyway). Nicholas Hoult was originally cast in the role portrayed by Morales but, in March 2020, Variety reported that he was leaving the project because the movie's COVID-caused delays had caused a scheduling conflict for the Fury Road actor. Morales' previous credits include NYPD Blue and Ozark .

Look, it's Hayley Atwell!

The first half of the trailer also introduces, briefly, the characters played by Guardians of the Galaxy franchise star Pom Klementieff and her fellow Marvel star Hayley Atwell. Little is known at present about who either actress is playing but on the Light the Fuse podcast McQuarrie described Atwell's character as "a destructive force of nature." Later on in the trailer, we see another M:I newbie, Shea Whigham, from Boardwalk Empire and The Wolf of Wall Street . In an interview with the Radio Times earlier in the year, Whigham revealed that he is playing a character called Jasper Briggs, who is on the hunt for Hunt, and that he will also appear in the film's sequel. "You'll see over the course of seven and eight why I'm trying to track Ethan Hunt," he said. "It's one of the best things I've ever got a chance to be a part of."

Cruise close-up

We finally get a good look at our hero, Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt, who really doesn't seem to be taking Kittridge's lecture well. Then again, Hunt has good reason to be suspicious of people who present themselves as colleagues, with Henry Cavill's August Walker in 2018's Mission: Impossible – Fallout just being the most recent example of a character not to be trusted (although that mustache really should have tipped-off Ethan from the start).

The gang's all here!

In the course of the franchise, Hunt has gathered a band of collaborators seen here. Simon Pegg first played Benji Dunn in 2006's Mission: Impossible III ; Rhames' Luther was introduced in the very first film; and Rebecca Ferguson's MI6 agent Ilsa Faust arrived in 2015's Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation .

Training-day

One of the film's major action set-pieces takes place on a train, which can be taken as both a homage to Brian De Palma's original film and a reminder that there aren't many means of transportation that have not now featured in the franchise.

Leap of faith

The trailer saves its most spectacular sight for the last moment as we see Cruise's character ride a motorbike off a cliff. At last August's CinemaCon, Paramount showed footage of Cruise working with stuntmen to prepare to fly off the bike in mid-air and parachute to the ground. Writer-director McQuarrie called it not only the biggest stunt in the movie, but "by far the most dangerous stunt we've ever done."

Watch the trailer for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One below.

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It's no secret that Tom Cruise is serious about his stunt work, and in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One , he wasted no time taking on a death-defying scene!

Cruise sat down with ET's Nischelle Turner in Rome this week to preview the upcoming action flick, and he shared an interesting fact about the production, revealing that the  most dangerous stunt of his career -- a motorcycle jump off of a cliff into a base jump -- was the first-ever scene filmed for Dead Reckoning Part One .

"Well, we know either we're gonna continue with the film or we're not," Cruise said with a laugh of planning the death-defying stunt. "Let's know day one... Do we all continue, or is it a major rewrite?"

In all seriousness, the actor added, it all came down to focus. "It was years preparing. I mean, I've been riding motorcycles since I was a little kid, raced cars and spent a lot of time just with aerobatics, airplanes, helicopters and parachutes... It all kind of came to that moment."

"You have to be razor sharp when you do something like that, so it was very important as we were prepping the film that that actually was the first thing [to shoot], because I don't want to drop that and go shoot other things and then have my mind somewhere else," he continued. "Everyone was prepped, let's just get it done."

And it wasn't just the one stunt that Cruise was hyper-focused on throughout the film's production. He did his own stunt driving for an intense chase scene throughout the streets of Rome -- while his character was handcuffed to franchise newcomer Hayley Atwel l, no less -- saying the challenges he takes on as a performer are indicative of his devotion to the action-packed franchise.

"Mission: Impossible is the first film I ever produced," he recalled of the impact the films have had on his career, dating back to the 1996 original. "There's certain things that I felt that we could tell with motion, with action and with stories and to be able to travel the world, that I really wanted to- I hoped that I could be able to accomplish with Mission: Impossible."

" I really always wanted to travel the world and be part of that community and then celebrate that community," he added. " Mission: Impossible allows me to do that."

Cruise's legacy as a box-office star is without question, and he hit a new major milestone last year, when Top Gun: Maverick became his first film to bring in over a billion dollars, bringing his career total box office to over $10 billion.

"You know, it was important last summer because of what we went through in [COVID shutdowns]," he noted. "For me, I love movies on the big screen and we have, you know, our families, how it spreads out to the other platforms, I understand that, but the way that I make movies, what I love about films is -- and I've always been someone who's promoted the big screen experience -- I make movies for audiences and to see how much they enjoyed it."

"To see [ Maverick ] open up the way it did, it meant a lot to me in so many ways," Cruise continued. "I mean, for me, when we're in Cannes, I was looking at all of [the cast]. I was like, I want you to have this experience. I wanted them to have that kind of experience, that we all worked hard and we all created this together. It was very special."

And, no surprise, he's not planning to slow down anytime soon. While Cruise and Mission: Impossible writer-director Christopher McQuarrie still have some work to do on Dead Reckoning Part Two --  due out in June 2024 and set to be Cruise's final bow as Ethan Hunt -- the actor said they're already planning for what comes next.

"A few days ago, I turned to McQ like, you know, we've got to start thinking about what we're gonna do next summer when we're done with this," he shared with a laugh. "This is what I do, I make movies... I absolutely love it."

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is in theaters July 12.

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• Mission Impossible

How to Watch the 'Mission: Impossible' Movies in Order (Chronologically and by Release Date)

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The Big Picture

• Tom Cruise has been the face of the Mission: Impossible franchise for 25 years, playing the daring and intelligent Ethan Hunt.
• The franchise has released seven films so far, with Mission: Impossible 8 coming in summer of 2025.
• The movies can be watched in either release date order or chronological order, with each installment building upon the previous ones.

Tom Cruise helped revive a franchise in 1996 when he starred in the first Mission: Impossible film as Ethan Hunt, a member of a fictional spy agency called Impossible Missions Force, or IMF. The first film kicked off a successful movie franchise that's run for 25 years, with the number of Mission: Impossible nearing the double digits. The entire series focuses on the daring and intelligent Hunt, and while playing the same character for more than two decades is no small feat, Cruise makes the impossible look easy. While Cruise has been onboard for all of the Mission: Impossible films — seven so far, with the eighth having stopped filming due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike — the other actor who’s been by his side since day one is Ving Rhames , who plays Luther Stickell, an expert hacker at IMF and Hunt’s most trusted friend. Over the years, many great actors like Jon Voight , Philip Seymour Hoffman , and Angela Bassett have had roles in the franchise, whether as allies or antagonists to Hunt.

Thankfully, for anyone wondering how to watch the Mission: Impossible movies in chronological order or by release date, the action spy franchise isn’t as complicated as Hunt’s “impossible” missions. Here’s a straightforward guide.

Editor's Note: This article was updated on November 5, 2023.

• Mission: Impossible

An American agent, under false suspicion of disloyalty, must discover and expose the real spy without the help of his organization.

Mission Impossible Movies In Order of Release Date

Here’s every film in the Mission: Impossible movie franchise, in the order they were released in:

Mission: Impossible (1996)

Mission: impossible 2 (2000), mission: impossible iii (2006).

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

Mission Impossible Movies in Chronological Order of Events

The timeline of the Mission: Impossible franchise is pretty straightforward, but if you're wondering when Cruise climbed the Burj Khalifa, how many movies Ilsa Faust has been in, or who's been on Ethan Hunt's IMF team the longest, we've got you covered. Here's a breakdown of how to watch the Mission: Impossible films in chronological order and the important details to remember:

Based on the TV series of the same name that ran from 1966 to 1973, Mission: Impossible , the first film in what is now a multi-billion-dollar-earning franchise, takes the original story and turns it on its head. When a whole team of IMF agents is killed during a mission, Cruise’s Hunt is left as the only survivor. Unfortunately, surviving doesn’t do him much good, as IMF, in turn, suspects Hunt of being a mole in the organization and the one responsible for the killings. In order to prove his innocence, Hunt goes on the run in search of the real mole, intent on stopping them before they do any more damage. Along with Cruise and Rhames, Mission: Impossible also stars Voigt as Jim Phelps, one of the original series’s characters, Vanessa Redgrave as an arms dealer named Max, as well as Kristin Scott Thomas and Emilio Estevez as other major characters. Directed by Brian De Palma , the 1996 film is more of a contained, paranoid spy thriller, and ultimately, the franchise goes above and beyond the first film’s story and action sequences, but Mission: Impossible will always be the one that started it all.

Released four years after the first film, Mission: Impossible 2 , directed by John Woo, features the return of Hunt and the IMF, as Hunt is tasked with finding and disposing of a biochemical weapon called “Chimera.” The villain of this mission is a former IMF agent named Sean Ambrose, played by Dougray Scott . Other new additions to the cast are Thandiwe Newton as Nyah Nordoff-Hall, Ambrose’s ex-girlfriend who helps Hunt accomplish his task, as well as Brendan Gleeson as John C. McCloy, the CEO of Biocyte, the company that creates both the Chimera weapon and its antidote, “Bellerophon.” Ambrose aims to start a pandemic so that he can earn billions of dollars by selling the antidote, and Hunt and Nyah must secure the virus before it’s too late. The second film in the Mission: Impossible franchise ups the ante, with Hunt traveling all the way to Sydney, Australia to chase down Ambrose, and the action sequences are jam-packed in typical Woo fashion .

The third film in the Mission: Impossible franchise took a really long time to be released, with six years between 2000’s Mission: Impossible 2 and 2006’s Mission: Impossible III . The third outing for IMF agent Hunt introduces two more key characters to the story — Michelle Monaghan as Hunt's fiancée, Julia Meade, and Simon Pegg ’s Benji Dunn, an IMF technician and trusted teammate of Hunt’s. In Mission: Impossible III , Hunt attempts to retire from fieldwork and settle down with Julia, but the organization can’t seem to let him go. He is called in to rescue a kidnapped agent and stop an arms dealer named Owen Davian ( Seymour Hoffman ) from receiving a dangerous MacGuffin called the “Rabbit’s Foot.” All the while, Hunt tries to keep the secret of his real job from Julie, but despite his efforts, she gets dragged into danger anyway. Directed by J.J. Abrams , the third Mission: Impossible film also features many other fantastic actors, including Laurence Fishburne , Keri Russell , and Billy Crudup .

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

In the new decade, this is where the action franchise really hits its stride. The first Mission: Impossible film to have a subtitle, 2011’s Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol does not disappoint. After a mission goes terribly wrong, ending with the Kremlin blowing up, the U.S. government disavows IMF in what is known as the “Ghost Protocol,” leaving Hunt and his team alone and without backup. Along with Cruise, Rhames, Pegg, and Monaghan, the fourth Mission: Impossible film also stars Jeremy Renner , Paula Patton , Michael Nyqvist , and Léa Seydoux . While Hunt’s previous missions have involved traitor agents and virus weapons, this particular adventure features Hunt working to prevent a nuclear war. The stakes are higher than ever, and Hunt must overcome both physical and emotional hardships in order to do his job and save the world. The Iron Giant and Incredibles director Brad Bird made his live-action debut with Ghost Protocol , and the film is a major step up from the previous three, escalating the action set-pieces (most notably, Cruise's instantly iconic climb up the Burj Khalifa ) and introducing a more ensemble-driven approach the franchise is still embracing today.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

Enter Rebecca Ferguson . Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is the fifth film in the Mission: Impossible series that never seems to stop. Alongside Alec Baldwin , Sean Harris , and Tom Hollander , this movie marks the first appearance of Ferguson's Ilsa Faust , an MI6 agent who encounters Hunt while undercover in the Syndicate crime organization; an international group of spies who went rogue. Ferguson’s character is definitely one of the most complicated of the series so far, and she adds new life and intrigue to the franchise. After Hunt is captured by the Syndicate, led by Harris’s character Solomon Lane, he is tortured for information and later escapes with Faust’s help. The Syndicate’s main goal is to reconstruct the world order through a series of violent terrorist attacks, and of course, Hunt gets blamed for the crimes, leaving him constantly on the run. It’s an age-old story. Hunt gets involved with a huge conspiracy then gets framed and must go on the run, relying on his amazing skills as an agent to take the Syndicate down before they can complete their plan. Considering that this formula has gotten the franchise this far, there’s really no reason to change it up, but director Christopher McQuarrie makes it feel fresh and new with extraordinary stunts and a deeper interest in Hunt as a character. It's no wonder that he's the only filmmaker to date to stick with the franchise for multiple sequels.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

Mission: Impossible - Fallout follows Hunt, Faust, and the rest of Hunt's now-familiar team as they work to stop what’s left of the Syndicate. The organization has reformed as the Apostles, led by an unknown figure known as John Lark. After a mission to secure stolen plutonium cores doesn’t go well, Angela Bassett, finally joining the franchise as CIA Director Erika Sloane, assigns Henry Cavill ’s August Walker to oversee Hunt’s future missions. Meanwhile, an arms dealer named Alanna Mitsopolis, or the White Widow (a new character played by Vanessa Kirby ) causes trouble for Hunt and the IMF by stealing the plutonium to make a deal. According to Mitsopolis’s offer, Hunt must secure Lane (the villain from the previous movie) and deliver him to MI6, and she will give him the plutonium cores for the CIA and IMF. Of course, very little goes according to plan, as Hunt discovers that the person known as Lark is closer than he thought. Set two years after Rogue Nation , the two films’ plots are heavily intertwined, so it’s best to watch them together if you can.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

The latest chapter of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One features even bigger stunts than ever before and adds a host of exciting new cast members, including Hayley Atwell , Pom Klementieff , Shea Whigham, Esai Morales , Indira Varma , Cary Elwes , and Mark Gatiss , among others. Christopher McQuarrie once again wrote and directed the movie and will be doing the same for MIssion: Impossible 8 . The film introduces a new threat involving a familiar face, an organization known as the Community. It is by far the biggest film in the series, both in terms of cast and scope.

What's Next?

With every new installment, the Mission: Impossible franchise gets better and better. And while Dead Reckoning Part One may just be the best it's ever been, Cruise and McQuarrie will be looking to top that with Mission: Impossible 8 . However, the film has been delayed multiple times and has undergone a quiet name change. As of now, the eighth part of Ethan Hunt's story is set to premiere on Memorial Day, May 23, 2025.

Watch the Mission: Impossible franchise on Paramount+ in the U.S.

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The World’s Coming After Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 7

Your mission — should you choose to accept it: Reveal the whereabouts of Shelly Miscavige.

Kidding, Tom Cruise . Kidding! Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to gain access to the mechanisms that sway public thought and morality, according to a villain-adjacent sales pitch by Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) in the final trailer for the seventh Mission: Impossible film, which is laboriously called Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. That’s some nice punctuation you have there, MI7. Where did you get it — the punctuation store ? “Hang on,” “Oh my God,” and “Go, go, go” are just some of the indelible phrases uttered in the new trailer, which also shows us explosions of trains, explosions of green substances, sexy Vanessa Kirby, a bunch of movie-critic quotes about how great it is , and no behind-the-scenes footage of Tom Cruise losing all five feet and seven inches of his shit at the film’s U.K. crew . The movie, should you choose to go see it, comes out July 12, 2023.

This post has been updated.

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Mission: Impossible 8

The 8th entry in the long running Mission Impossible franchise. The 8th entry in the long running Mission Impossible franchise. The 8th entry in the long running Mission Impossible franchise.

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Tom Cruise’s daughter Suri ditches his last name for her graduation — which he missed

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Tom Cruise’s daughter Suri is going by a new last name.

At her graduation Friday from LaGuardia High School in New York City, the 18-year-old opted to give her name as “Suri Noelle” instead of Suri Cruise; she also used that name earlier this year when she appeared in a high school production of the jukebox musical “Head Over Heels.” Noelle is the middle name of her mother, Katie Holmes.

The “Risky Business” actor appears to have skipped Suri’s graduation weekend to hang out instead Saturday with all the celebs at Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in London , where he is filming another “Mission: Impossible” installment.

Holmes and Suri didn’t seem bothered by his absence on graduation day. The mother-daughter duo, perhaps eager to “shake it off,” were seen giggling and taking photos together outside of the graduation venue in celebration of Suri’s achievement.

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Suri was born in 2006, just before her parents tied the knot. TomKat stayed together until 2012, when Holmes filed for divorce , but Cruise was plagued by rumors that he had abandoned Suri in the process. In a 2013 defamation lawsuit filed by Cruise against Life & Style and In Touch publisher Bauer Publishing, the “Mission: Impossible” actor said, “The assertion that I ‘abandoned’ Suri after my divorce is patently false. I have in no way cut Suri out of my life — whether physically, emotionally, financially or otherwise.”

Cruise said he and Suri, who was then 6, “spoke on the phone nearly every day” and that he “regularly asked for and received updates concerning her friends and school life.”

Cruise is also the father of Bella, 31, and Connor, 29, whom he adopted with Nicole Kidman when they were married. Last year, he was photographed in public with Bella and Connor, reportedly for the first time in 15 years.

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Eva Hartman is a spring 2024 reporting intern with the Fast Break Desk at the Los Angeles Times. She is a senior at the University of Southern California studying international relations, where she has served as the news assignments editor and magazine editor at the Daily Trojan.

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How Tom Cruise and Wolf Blitzer Pulled Off the Biggest Twist in Mission Impossible History

Inverse talks to the team behind Mission: Impossible — Fallout’s unforgettable opening sequence.

Would you believe Tom Cruise if he told you the world had ended? What about Wolf Blitzer? That’s the question audiences faced in 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout . But just like in any good Ethan Hunt adventure, the truth is never what it seems.

The Mission: Impossible movies know how to pull off an opening. Whether it’s Tom Cruise hanging off a rust-red mountain , or Tom Cruise pulling off a mask to reveal his true identity, or Tom Cruise… you get the idea, this is a franchise whose fans expect to be glued to their seats from the moment the Paramount logo appears on the screen.

Fallout is no different. A Mission: Impossible audience is never entirely sure that any character onscreen is who they say they are. Being tricked is the name of the game. And for the sixth film in the franchise, Cruise and company decided to fool the audience with a delicious trick involving one of the most famous newsreaders on the planet. As the film’s production designer, Peter Wenham, tells Inverse , “The Wolf Blitzer of it all was a bit of a coup.”

Anatomy of a Scene

We won’t be recapping the entire scene with all its twists and turns here (for that, just watch the video above), but here’s a rapid-fire synopsis: Fallout opens with Hunt, Luther (Ving Rhames), and Benji (Simon Pegg) facing off against a terrorist who’s got his hands on some nuclear warheads. The meeting goes sideways, but after capturing the nuclear scientist in a fight that leaves him unconscious, the Impossible Missions Force hatches a plot: trick the villain by making him think he’s already won.

To pull it off, they build a fake hospital room (and a fake CNN anchor desk), put Benji in a super-realistic Wolf Blitzer mask, and somehow record fake footage of the Vatican smouldering in the aftermath of a nuclear blast. It works, of course, and as the good guys celebrate and the bad guy’s jaw hits the floor, that familiar music begins to play. Roll opening credits.

Tricking the Audience

Wolf Blitzer confirms the worst possible news.

As editor Eddie Hamilton points out, when the audience is by Ethan at the television, “We’re starting to fool the audience a little bit about the fact that these attacks may have happened; people are like, ‘Blimey, this movie got dark really quickly.’” Because editing is all about point of view, it was crucial to ensure that from this moment on, the audience saw the scene almost entirely from Delbruuk’s perspective, so they were as oblivious as he was about the illusion. “As you’re editing, you’re constantly making sure you’re cutting back to his reactions, so you feel everything that he is feeling.”

The scene was filmed at Warner Bros. Studios in Leavesden, just outside London. Hamilton remembers seeing Gal Gadot walking out in full Wonder Woman costume at one point. “I remember just stopping in awe at this Amazonian goddess in front of me and just staring at her for 10 seconds,” he says. “And she smiled at me and waved and walked off. It was the most astonishing sight.”

“It’s fun to feel the villain realize that he’s been fooled and also the audience has been fooled.”

The faux hospital room was designed by Wenham and his team. He estimates that the whole thing, including the fake CNN set in which Blitzer sat, took around 50 people four weeks to make. When the Impossible Missions Force reveals that the room was purpose-built to deceive Delbruuk, the four walls collapse, unveiling the truth to the scientist.

“You don’t need that in the story because you’ve got the information,” says Hamilton, “but it’s fun for the audience to have that reveal, and it’s fun to feel the villain realize that he’s been fooled and also the audience has been fooled.”

As the walls had steel frames, they needed to fall onto dampeners because they weighed at least 400 pounds each. During filming, they only needed to do it twice, having rehearsed it a good deal before.

Assembling the Team

“Every second of every frame is valuable.”

Blitzer was “completely thrilled to be invited,” Hamilton says. “He thought it was a hoot.”

As Wenham points out, the anchor’s involvement lent credibility to the whole idea — both to the audience and to Delbruuk. This isn’t an anonymous presenter, so the assumption is that it must be real news footage. Blitzer arrived on a jet, did his lines impeccably, and, according to Wenham, was gone within about 24 hours. After the film, Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie organized for the Blitzer mask to be delivered to his CNN office in a purpose-built glass cabinet so that he could display it.

The whole scene took around seven-and-a-half hours to film, according to Hamilton. Actors will often give between 50 and 70 variations of each line, and he and McQuarrie spent more than a day looking at every single nuance of every performance.

“We did modulate how angry Ethan got, ranging from very angry and absolutely manic to much less angry, and we kind of found a medium ground. It wasn’t Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon .” The first assembly of the footage was around two minutes longer than the five minutes it would eventually become. “Every second of every frame is valuable,” Hamilton says.

As for music, composer Lorne Balfe remembers that McQuarrie wasn’t far off, singing to him in order to communicate what he had in his mind.

“There’s a lot of information being given,” says Balfe, “and we tried lots of different rhythms and more melodic ideas, but he felt like it was clashing significantly with the dialogue.” They settled on what Balfe describes as two chords repeating back and forth — simple so as not to affect the dialogue — and gradually building in intensity.

As the reveal happens, the audience begins to smile, and Delbruuk begins to turn white. Hamilton reveals that Delbruuk’s final line — the confused “The attacks didn’t happen” — was recorded after the scene was filmed. This was because “people weren’t 100 percent clear that the attacks hadn’t happened,” and the film couldn’t continue with the audience not being absolutely sure.

Just before this, Lalo Schifrin’s infamous theme music slowly begins to come in.

“It starts off with one bongo player,” says Balfe, “and then another one joins in, and then another one, and then another one, and another one. The way we recorded was that it was in a half-moon shape, so the sound goes from left to right, so that in the cinema, you hear it the way we recorded it.”

In the end, says Balfe, around a dozen bongo players were involved in the drumroll, with the strings contributing their notorious interjections.

“It basically just starts giving the audience permission to have fun.”

“There’s no one like him”: Mission Impossible Star Puts Tom Cruise on a Pedestal That’s Hard to Reach Even for Her Co-Star Robert Downey Jr. Despite His Oscar Win

W hen it comes to undisputed box office superstardom, it is difficult to look past Tom Cruise. The charismatic actor has proved his impact in Hollywood time and again through blockbusters that have cemented his place as one of the most influential celebrities in the industry. Not only is he an icon for fans, but is also respected highly by his various co-actors.

Michelle Monaghan who has worked with the Top Gun star in 3 films in his blockbuster franchise Mission: Impossible , was effusive in her appreciation for Cruise and her unforgettable working experience with him. These are high words of praise coming from Monaghan who has worked with other superstars like Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. as well.

Tom Cruise Made A Huge Impact On His Mission: Impossible Co-Star

Tom Cruise’s aura on and off screen that has sometimes been controversial, has also played an important part in how the actor has been perceived by his peers. Over the years, Cruise’s persona has found him gaining a lot of adulation and admiration from co-stars who have been awestruck by his passion for cinema.

One of these celebrities was Michelle Monaghan who was a prominent presence in Cruise’s blockbuster Mission: Impossible franchise. Introduced as Ethan Hunt’s love interest Julia in Mission: Impossible 3 , Monaghan reprised the role in 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol , and 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout.

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Speaking about the Cocktail actor’s charisma, prowess, and her unforgettable experience sharing screen space with him (via Looper ), the Pixels star couldn’t stop expressing her admiration for Cruise and what he represented.

There’s no one like him. He really is amongst the best of the best. He is someone who truly, truly connects with you as an actor, as a person, and really draws out an incredible performance. I don’t know if I’ve ever worked with an actor that I’ve been more connected to in the moment.

These are very high words of praise considering the fact that Monaghan has worked with the likes of Robert Downey Jr. who is a recent Oscar winner, and Val Kilmer in 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which catapulted her into the big leagues. While she had a lot of admiration for these two celebrities, it seems that no one but Cruise can take the top spot, judging by her statements about him.

Tom Cruise Was The Favorite Of These Stars As Well

Despite living life king-size, Tom Cruise has never let his iconic superstardom get in the way of his humility. The celebrity has been hailed by many of his co-stars as one of the most amicable actors to work with on set. His two Mission: Impossible co-stars Hayley Atwell and Vanessa Kirby gushed about the actor (via E News ), with Atwell appreciating his ability to make everyone comfortable on set.

British actor Simon Pegg has possibly known Cruise most intimately from his association with the celebrity since 2006 when he entered the Mission: Impossible franchise. Pegg was effusive in his praise for the Eyes White Shut star and called him one of the most caring co-actors that he had ever worked with on set.

“Of all the mist of stuff that’s around him, in the center of that mist is a generous, sweet guy who looks after everybody. He leads from the top down. And he’s kind of inspiring to be around. There’s no one else like him, he’s the last movie star of the old kind.

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Pegg went on to add that Tom Cruise’s attitude towards people and his passion for cinema never changed despite becoming one of the world’s biggest superstars. The British actor admitted that he felt fortunate to have him as his friend for over 17 years.