Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

• 1. Introduction

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  At the New York premiere of Mission: Impossible , The Final Reckoning in May 2025, Tom Cruise left no room for doubt about the title. "It's the final! It's not called 'final' for nothing," he said, confirming that this would be his last time playing Ethan Hunt. The 2025 American action spy film is the eighth in the Mission: Impossible series. It is also the direct sequel to Dead Reckoning Part One, released in 2023. Christopher McQuarrie directed it from a screenplay he co-wrote with Erik Jendresen. Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny and Angela Bassett stand beside Cruise in the ensemble. A farewell like this raises questions. What kind of enemy does a final mission require? How does a production survive strikes and years of interruption? And did audiences turn out for the goodbye in numbers that matched its price?

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• 2. Countdown to Armageddon

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  Two months after Ethan Hunt retrieved the key to the source code of the Entity, the threat has not gone away. The Entity is a malevolent artificial intelligence, and U.S. President Erika Sloane sends Hunt a grim message. It keeps seizing control of nuclear systems around the world, and undercover doomsday cultists are helping it. Sloane orders Hunt to surrender the key. He refuses, and from that point he operates as a rogue IMF agent. Instead he keeps chasing Gabriel, the Entity's former proxy, who was cast aside after failing to steal the key himself.

  Luther Stickell waits in an off-grid laboratory beneath London, and he is ill. Hunt and fellow agent Benji Dunn find that Luther has finished building malware called the "Poison Pill," designed to target the Entity. In Austria, the team also breaks Gabriel's former lieutenant, Paris, out of prison. They recruit Theo Degas, the partner of Jasper Briggs, as well.

  In London, Gabriel's men capture Ethan and a fellow IMF agent named Grace. Gabriel wants the "Podkova" module, which was developed from the Rabbit's Foot and lies inside the sunken Russian submarine Sevastopol. Whoever holds it would gain control over the Entity. With help from the team, Ethan and Grace escape. When Ethan contacts the Entity directly, it shows him visions of a nuclear apocalypse. It tells him that Luther will die and demands access to a digital bunker in South Africa so that it can survive.

  Luther's death comes soon after. Gabriel steals the Poison Pill and traps Luther with a time bomb, and Luther sacrifices himself to minimize the blast while Ethan escapes. Briggs catches Ethan and is revealed to be the son of Jim Phelps. Ethan is taken to the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center. Only three days remain before the Entity takes over the remaining nuclear weapons control facilities. Over the objections of CIA director Eugene Kittridge, Ethan convinces Sloane to let him locate the Sevastopol. Finding the wreck sends part of his team to a remote island.

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• 3. Sonar and Submarines

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  St. Matthew Island sits in the Bering Sea, and it hosts a Cold War era naval sonar array that detected the Sevastopol's sinking. Grace, Benji, Paris and Degas travel there to learn where the wreck lies. They meet William Donloe, a former CIA analyst exiled to the island after Ethan's break-in at CIA headquarters thirty years earlier. By coincidence, Donloe memorized the Sevastopol's coordinates. Russian special forces intercept the team, seeking the same numbers. Grace and Donloe's wife, Tapeesa, escape by dog sled while the others fight off the soldiers. Donloe transmits the coordinates to Ethan.

  Ethan, meanwhile, joins the aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush in the northern Pacific Ocean and boards the submarine USS Ohio. A doomsday assassin named Hagar has infiltrated the Ohio, and Ethan barely survives her. With the coordinates in hand, he uses an experimental diving suit to reach the Sevastopol. He retrieves the Podkova as the wreck slides down the continental shelf. He escapes narrowly and without his suit. Grace then revives him from decompression sickness using a portable decompression chamber.

  Once the team is reunited, Ethan lays out a plan. He will plug the Poison Pill into the Podkova and fool the Entity into entering a physical drive instead of the bunker mainframe. That plan needs a place to be carried out, and the digital bunker in South Africa is where it will be tested.

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• 4. Biplanes and Fire

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  Inside the bunker, Gabriel springs a trap with a timed nuclear device and demands the Podkova. Kittridge arrives with a team of agents who want control of the Entity for themselves. During the gunfight, the bomb is activated and Benji is shot. Gabriel slips away with the Poison Pill, and Ethan follows with the Podkova. Donloe, Tapeesa and Degas defuse the bomb. Paris, Grace and Benji prepare the mainframe to trap the Entity. President Sloane refuses to order a preemptive nuclear strike. A failed attack by a doomsday assassin buys the Entity time to take full control of the world's nuclear arsenal.

  Then comes a long chase between two biplanes. Ethan climbs onto Gabriel's plane and retrieves the Poison Pill. Gabriel attempts a reckless escape and is killed when his forehead strikes the plane's vertical stabilizer. Parachuting away, Ethan slots the Poison Pill into the Podkova in mid-air. Grace traps the Entity just before the nuclear launch.

  Afterward the film slows down. Ethan listens to a farewell message from Luther stored in the Poison Pill, which then self-destructs. He hands the ruined Podkova to Kittridge, and Briggs makes amends with Ethan for exposing his father as a traitor. In London's Trafalgar Square, Grace gives Ethan the drive holding the Entity, and the IMF team parts ways.

  During filming in England in 2024, observers watched Cruise and his co-star Esai Morales performing stunts from an airborne biplane. Cruise held onto the wings of the open cockpit aircraft while it flew upside down. The pilot wore a greenscreen suit so that he could be digitally removed from the final shot.

  One of the last stunts shot for the film earned Cruise a Guinness World Record for the most burning parachute jumps by an individual. He burned a first parachute doused in flammable liquid before opening a second one, and he did this sixteen times in total. Guinness published an article about the stunt on the 5th of June 2025.

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• 5. Ghosts of Missions Past

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  Jon Voight appears as Jim Phelps through archival footage from earlier films in the series. He is one of more than two dozen actors who return this way. Anthony Hopkins appears as Swanbeck, and Alec Baldwin appears as Alan Hunley. Philip Seymour Hoffman, as Owen Davian, and Michael Nyqvist, as Dr. Kurt "Cobalt" Hendricks, appear posthumously. The film treats the whole series as a shared memory.

  Rob Delaney and Indira Varma are uncredited in the film. Through archival audio from Dead Reckoning, they supply the voices of the heads of JSOC and the DIA. Director Christopher McQuarrie makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film.

  Some returning faces are not archival at all. Henry Czerny reprises Eugene Kittridge, a role he played in Dead Reckoning Part One and in the first film. Rolf Saxon, who joined the cast in March 2023, reprises his role from that first film. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune singled him out. "He may not hang off a biplane, but the year's unlikeliest franchise MVP makes Final Reckoning something better than superhuman: human," he wrote.

  Critics noticed the nostalgia too. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film five stars out of five. He called it a "wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films." Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post praised "a callback from the first film that strikes a particularly winning chord of humor and sentimentality."

  Not everyone who was announced made it to the screen. Vanessa Kirby, who first appeared in Fallout, said she was returning for both films but did not appear in The Final Reckoning.

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• 6. Years of Delay

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  On the 14th of January 2019, Tom Cruise revealed that the seventh and eighth Mission: Impossible films would be shot back-to-back. McQuarrie would write and direct both, aiming for releases on the 23rd of July 2021 and the 5th of August 2022. In February 2021, Deadline Hollywood reported that Paramount had decided not to proceed that way. By November, McQuarrie was rewriting the script for the eighth film.

  The cast changed as the plans changed. Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff joined in September 2019. Nicholas Hoult was in the cast by January 2020 but was replaced by Esai Morales for both films because of scheduling conflicts. In November 2024, it was announced that Angela Bassett would reprise her role as CIA director Erika Sloane.

  On the 23rd of March 2022, The Hollywood Reporter reported the start of principal photography on the then-untitled Mission: Impossible 8. Filming took place in England at Longcross Studios and in the Lake District. Other locations included Malta, Norway and South Africa. Filming in the UK finished in December 2022, and the crew moved to Apulia in Italy to shoot aboard the aircraft carrier.

  Then the strikes arrived. An interview with McQuarrie in the June 2023 issue of Empire magazine led many to think the Writers Guild of America strike had halted production. That was later called a misinterpretation, since the film was merely waiting for the promotion of Part One to finish. In July 2023, filming was officially suspended because of the SAG-AFTRA strike. It returned to production in March 2024. In May, a submarine malfunction caused another delay. In July 2024, Simon Pegg revealed that filming had concluded for his part, though the cast and crew kept radio silence. By November 2024, production had finished.

  The release date moved repeatedly. The film was first set for the 5th of August 2022, then the 4th of November 2022, the 7th of July 2023 and the 28th of June 2024. It finally landed on the 23rd of May 2025, taking the original date of The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants. The subtitle Dead Reckoning Part Two was removed in October 2023, and The Final Reckoning was confirmed on the 11th of November 2024.

  Industrial Light & Magic returned from the seventh film to produce the visual effects. Clear Angle Studios and Halon Entertainment were additional vendors for lidar, cyber scanning and previsualization. Lorne Balfe, who scored Fallout and Dead Reckoning Part One, was announced as the composer in May 2020. In April 2025, it was revealed that Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey would replace him.

  The delays had a price. The Hollywood Reporter reported that the budget had neared $400 million.

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• 7. Box Office Math

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  The Final Reckoning premiered in Tokyo on the 5th of May 2025 and screened out of competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival on the 14th of May. Paramount Pictures released it in the United States on the 23rd of May. Australia, India, New Zealand, the Philippines and South Korea got it on the 17th of May, and the United Kingdom followed on the 21st. It played in premium formats including 4DX, Dolby Cinema, IMAX, RPX and ScreenX.

  Opening day in the United States and Canada brought in $24.8 million, including $8.3 million from Thursday night previews. That set a new opening day record for the franchise. Forecasters had projected $80-110 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend, with Lilo & Stitch opening alongside. The film debuted to $64 million over the standard three days and $79 million over four, placing second behind Lilo & Stitch. That was the largest opening weekend of the series. It was also the first time a series entry did not open at number one, with Ghost Protocol's limited large-format release as the one footnote. All films combined for $334.5 million that weekend, the biggest Memorial Day weekend in domestic history.

  The second weekend brought $27.3 million, a drop of 57%, still good for second place ahead of Karate Kid: Legends. The third weekend took $14.8 million and third place behind Lilo & Stitch and Ballerina.

  Abroad, the film opened in 64 markets alongside the United States and Canada and earned $127 million in its first weekend. South Korea led with $12.7 million, followed by Japan at $11 million and the United Kingdom at $10.7 million. IMAX screens supplied $31 million, the best of the franchise. China followed on the 2nd of June, and the film topped the box office there with $25.6 million. IMAX supplied $4.9 million of that, making it IMAX's biggest opening weekend for a Hollywood film in China in 2025.

  The worldwide total reached $598.8 million, made up of $197.4 million in the United States and Canada and $401.4 million in other territories. Measured against its price tag, it was considered a box office disappointment. Industry expectations suggested the film might need around $1 billion worldwide to recoup its costs, and its performance on Paramount+ was also expected to matter. It was the final film co-produced by Paramount and Skydance as separate entities, before they merged on the 7th of August 2025.

  Digital download followed on the 19th of August 2025. The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray and DVD arrived on the 14th of October 2025, and streaming on Paramount+ began on the 4th of December 2025. On the 3rd of April 2026, the film started streaming on Prime Video.

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• 8. Reviews and Afterlife

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  Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of A-minus on a scale running from A-plus to F. Those surveyed by PostTrak gave it an 89% overall positive score, and 79% said they would definitely recommend it. Critics were generally positive but more subdued than they had been for the four previous critically acclaimed installments. Many praised the action sequences while criticizing the exposition in the first hour.

  Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune called the film a "satisfying capper to an eight-film franchise." Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph described a "widely presumed last entry" that was an "awe-inspiringly bananas piece of work." Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post gave it three out of four stars and said it too often felt "baggy and redundant."

  Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com was harsher. He called the first hour "unwieldy and truly clunky" and "the worst segment in the entire franchise." Still, he said the action sequences at the film's peaks were "enough to ignore everything wrong with the movie up to that point." Cary Darling of the Houston Chronicle found the film "bloated and tired" despite the "dizzying, high-flying stunt work at the film's climax." He also noted the runtime. "Just shy of three hours (the longest in the series), it takes a heck of a long time to achieve lift-off," he wrote.

  The question of a future began before the film even finished. In June 2023, McQuarrie told Fandango that the two parts of Dead Reckoning would not necessarily end the series. In July 2023, Cruise expressed interest in playing Hunt again in future films. He cited Harrison Ford's portrayal of Indiana Jones over more than 40 years, from Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2023.

  On the 12th of November 2024, Jeff Sneider reported that Cruise wanted Glen Powell, a co-star from Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, to replace him as lead in potential future films. Powell denied the report during an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show.

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