In the lucrative holiday box office window of 2011,Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocolgrossed nearly twice as much as its predecessor. Brad Bird’s jaw-dropping live-action debut turned theMission: Impossibleseries from a middling action movie franchise into a must-see blockbuster extravaganza. Unlike its predecessors,Ghost Protocolprovided audiences with spectacle on the scale ofFast & Furiousbut with real tension and stakes and realism, thanks to minimal CGI and a daring star/producer who’s willing to do the majority of the dangerous spy action for real.
The most thrilling set-piece inGhost Protocol– and the image the studio hung the whole marketing campaign on – sees Tom Cruise scaling the facade of the tallest skyscraper on Earth: the Burj Khalifa. Cruise actually performed this entire sequence for real, albeit with a couple of harnesses edited out by the VFX team, swinging from the side of the building at a dizzying altitude likea true-to-life Spider-Man.
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Since then, theM:Imovies have been defined by their breathtaking in-camera stunt work. Cruise’s practical stunt work is refreshing in an era of action cinema rammed with weightless CGI. It harks back to the old-school techniques ofSergio Leone’s spaghetti westernsand the originalIndiana Jonestrilogy. Ever since Cruise scaled the Burj Khalifa, theMission: Impossibleseries has become an exercise in one-upmanship as the actor keeps pushing himself to new extremes. This franchise tradition must be a nightmare for the studio’s insurers, but it’s a dream for moviegoers.
Rogue Nation’s Fatal Flaw
AfterGhost Protocoltook not only the franchise but alsothe entire action genreto new heights of spectacle, a lot was riding on its follow-up. For the nextM:Imovie, 2015’sMission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Cruise reteamed withJack Reacherdirector Christopher McQuarrie. WithRogue Nation, Cruise and McQuarrie’s primary goal from the very first frame was to outdoGhost Protocol’s Burj Khalifa sequence. The movie opens with Cruise hanging on the side of a plane during take-off. Much like the Burj Khalifa set-piece, Cruise acted out this whole sequence in real-time with a couple of unseen harnesses. He jumped onto the wing of a plane, clung to the side of it, and held on as it took off.
McQuarrie captured this stunt in a stunning long take from a camera strapped to the plane as Cruise soared into the sky and the runway disappeared behind him. It’s a truly astounding sequence – and that’s the problem. The movie opens with the biggest, boldest stunt it has to offer. None of the action in the rest ofRogue Nationcould top that opening scene. It’s not a bad movie by any means, and it does have plenty of great stunts in the second and third acts, but afteropening with the plane sequence, the whole rest of the movie can’t help but feel anticlimactic.
Fallout’s Fix
When McQuarrie signed on to direct the sequel toRogue Nation, he made minor movie history as the firstMission: Impossibledirector to return for a second movie.Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, and Brad Bird all departed the franchise after one movie, but after the success ofRogue Nation, McQuarrie came back to helm 2018’sMission: Impossible – Fallout. And from the opening scene ofFallout, it was clear that McQuarrie learned an important lesson fromRogue Nation’s fatal flaw.
AfterRogue Nationsuffered from opening with its most exciting sequence,Falloutwent the other way. The sixthMission: Impossiblefilm has a relatively low-key opening with a shadowy rendezvous in an underpass that seemingly goes horribly wrong for our favorite IMF team. Then, in the following scene, they trick a terrorist with a Wolf Blitzer disguise (featuring a cameo appearance by the CNN reporter himself). This sequence doesn’t hinge on a life-threatening physical feat likeRogue Nation’s opening; it’s a dialogue-driven scene ofclassic spy movie trickery.
After the Blitzer cameo kicks off the opening title sequence, the rest ofFalloutfeatures huge, mind-blowing, Burj Khalifa-level stunts every few minutes right up to the end of the movie. ThroughoutFallout’s whopping, yet briskly paced two-and-a-half-hour runtime, the audience is never more than a couple of minutes away from watching Cruise put himself in harm’s way for the sake of their entertainment. On the way to the big finale – in which Cruise hangs from a helicopter, hijacks it, then chases another helicopter through a narrow valley – the fearless A-lister does a HALO jump out of a plane, leaps from rooftop to rooftop (and sustains an actual broken bone that made it into the final cut), and hops on a motorcycle and takes the French police on a wild goose chase the wrong way around the Arc de Triomphe.
Cruise is currently working on back-to-back seventh and eighthMission: Impossiblemovies, set to arrive in theaters on June 06, 2025, and July 03, 2025, respectively. These movies are both being written and directed by McQuarrie. WhenMission: Impossible 8is in the can, McQuarrie will have directed as manyMission: Impossiblemovies as all the otherMission: Impossiblemovie directors combined. This double whammy ofM:Iis planned asa send-off for Ethan Hunt, following the ongoing trend of two-part franchise finales also seen inHarry Potter,The Hunger Games,The Avengers,Twilight, andthe upcomingFast & Furiousfinale. If Cruise and McQuarrie continue theirMission: Impossibletrajectory, the seventh and eighth movies could feature an even higher stunt quotient thanFallout.
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