Hear Me Out! After ‘Mission: Impossible
A new trailer for Tom Cruise‘s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning recently hit the internet, heralding the release of the eighth movie in the franchise by Paramount Pictures on May 23. Many fans of the series have already been pondering whether that will indeed be the last we see of Cruise’s IMF (Impossible Mission Force) agent Ethan Hunt, whose high-flyin adventures we’ve been following in theaters since back in 1996. In fact, Mission: Impossible has now lived so long in movie form that not so many fans of the franchise might even remember that it began as a popular television series that ran from 1966 through 1973.
Ever since 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Cruise has been keeping the franchise alive with director Christopher McQuarrie, making three movies that have made 100s of millions worldwide, introducing new characters while keeping fan favorites, such as Ving Rhames‘ Luthor and Simon Pegg‘s Benji, around. Cruise and McQuarrie have thrown everything into these movies, having spent the past five years making just two of the movies. Granted, those last two movies were hit by massive delays due to the COVID pandemic and various industry strikes. By now, the filmmakers have also probably realized how hard it is to keep the fans invested if they don’t deliver an unforgettable movie-going experience.
Surely, Tom Cruise Must Be Ready to Retire As Ethan Hunt
The Mission: Impossible franchise has been a mainstay for Tom Cruise to return to every few years, except that in the past 10 years, he has made only eight movies, and half of them have been part of that popular spy-thriller action franchise. One of the others was Top Gun: Maverick, the highest-grossing movie of 2022, and also, the biggest movie of Cruise’s entire career by far. And yet, the most recent installment, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1, took a noticeable hit at the box office compared to previous installments, possibly because it came out in the wake of the juggernaut that was “Barbenheimer.” Despite the title of the latest installment, Cruise has yet to outright say that it will be his last go-round as Ethan Hunt.
Age shouldn’t make that big a difference if Cruise wants to keep doing these movies, since he’s still younger than Liam Neeson, who has continued in the action realm for 17 years since making Taken. For each installment of the movie franchise, Cruise has continued to push the limits with the stunts that he would often perform himself, learning either how to fly an aircraft or hold onto one for dear life. There is no justifiable reason to bring in a new or younger actor, ala the James Bond franchise, because Cruise has continually proved that people are going to see the movie for him as much as for the character. And yet, there are so many possibilities about what can be done with either the character of Hunt or the IMF or both in a longer episodic format.
What Would a New ‘Mission: Impossible’ Series Offer?
Despite there being seven movies over 29 years, we still don’t know that much about Ethan Hunt before joining the IMF. In some ways, we know even less about the IMF and how it works, although we know it has many agents with different levels of loyalty, who are contacted by messages that self-destruct. Many of the recent plotlines have involved someone trying to find and kill agents, and Hunt trying to prevent it.
There must be a lot to learn about Hunt and the IMF from before the first Mission: Impossible, to offer intriguing storytelling that doesn’t require a massive budget. The good news is that there’s already a very good model for film franchises working as series, with two very specific and fairly recent cases of series based on Paramount Pictures franchises. One of them, Lee Child‘s Reacher, has become a hugely popular Prime Video series, but before that, Child’s literary character appeared in the 2012 Paramount movie, Jack Reacher, made by no less than Cruise and McQuarrie, before the latter joined Mission: Impossible. Another popular Paramount franchise that’s jumped to streaming is Tom Clancy‘s Jack Ryan, a role that actor John Krasinski took over for his own Prime Video series, with a feature film already in production, and with Krasinski reprising that role. Those are two great examples of how a studio has tried to keep a franchise alive in a shorter episodic form that doesn’t require the viewer to sit through two and a half hours just to get to a cliffhanger.
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Let’s face it that Paramount+ could really use a hit right now, as it’s lagging behind other streamers like Netflix, Max, and Hulu, both in terms of viewership and prestigious awards. For many years, Paramount+ has been all about Star Trek and Yellowstone spin-offs, which is perfectly fine, but an Ethan Hunt or IMF-related Mission: Impossible series could keep the franchise alive while giving Cruise and McQuarrie a much-needed rest after spending five years making just two movies. There’s no reason why Cruise and McQuarrie couldn’t stay involved as executive producers on a series either, so it’s not like their creative involvement in the franchise would just end outright. Setting up a successful prequel involving a younger Ethan Hunt would require finding a younger actor with charisma to spare, but a series could just as easily not include Hunt, and just show other agents of the IMF tackling difficult missions, similar to how the original series worked.
As much as we love watching Tom Cruise throwing caution to the wind and putting his own body on the line for the crazy stunts he performs in the Mission: Impossible movies, the idea that The Final Reckoning might actually be to Cruise what No Time to Die was to Daniel Craig‘s James Bond seems fairly palpable. We’ll always have eight great Tom Cruise-led movies to rewatch anytime we want, but shifting to television or streaming might be the way to go, not only to keep the franchise alive, but also to reduce overall expenses for the studio. The suspense and intrigue play just as big a role in the Mission: Impossible movies being so popular, and with the right showrunner, writers, and directors, a series could be just as tense and entertaining, as it brings viewers back on a weekly basis.
