Last week, I wrote about Mission: Impossible 8 and Tom Cruise’s desire to do this until he dies, and now, behold, the trailer for M:I 8 is here, officially titled Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. After Dead Reckoning underperformed last year, they’ve done away with the “part one” and “part two” subtitling scheme, which is a good call in general, but especially here since “part one” already didn’t win audiences. (Dead Reckoning is good, though, it was just a victim of timing, coming out one week before Barbenheimer.)
The trailer is appropriately epic, it looks like Tom Cruise is going to sprint his way to saving the world at last. The most interesting thing, though, is that title—Final Reckoning. FINAL. And the vibes of this trailer are very much “Ethan Hunt might actually die this time”, which is similar to how No Time to Die marketed Daniel Craig’s last outing as James Bond. So, IS Ethan Hunt actually going to die this time?
Doubt it! Back to what I wrote last week, Paramount wants to market this film as Tom Cruise’s last M:I movie, and that is apparently the tack on which they’re proceeding. But Cruise is on the record saying he wants to do this till he’s 80, citing Harrison Ford as an example of an action star who just keeps going. But it might be his last M:I movie for a while. The Paramount-Skydance merger is expected to close in early 2025, and then we’ll have to see what’s what when the dust settles. If Final Reckoning is a big hit next summer, though, continuing the M:I franchise in some way, shape, or form—they seem to be setting Hayley Atwell’s character up as a new Ethan Hunt-type, and don’t think I didn’t see Pom Klementieff’s character back from the dead in this new trailer, or that Cruise protégé Greg “Tarzan” Davis has apparently joined Team Ethan, too—will undoubtedly be a priority. After all, Skydance has been co-producing these films for like a decade. It’s not new business to them. It just has to remain GOOD business.
Speaking of good business, though, the stakes for Final Reckoning are incredibly high, since the film’s budget ballooned to a reported $400 million. Paramount will undoubtedly push back on this number because it’s so insanely high and that makes everyone nervous, but I’ll tell you this, rumors about budgets don’t get started when the budgets are reasonable. And that’s the kind of number that means Final Reckoning has to make a billion dollars to be profitable, and the new Paramount-Skydance entity will need it to be profitable. Paramount isn’t merging because they’re in good shape.
So, is this the final reckoning of Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible? I remain skeptical that anyone will ever pry Ethan Hunt out of Cruise’s hands. But the stakes are SO high. No M:I movie has ever made a billion dollars, and Final Reckoning is coming out at a critical juncture for Paramount-Skydance. And Cruise IS getting older, and to his point about Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny wasn’t nearly as successful as past Indiana Jones movies, which everyone involved with M:I WILL remember when considering another Cruise-led film.
The other side of that coin, though, is Top Gun: Maverick, though I maintain that film occupies a special place in pop culture. The future of Mission: Impossible and Tom Cruise is a big “wait and see”. In the meantime, though, Final Reckoning looks pretty rad.
