If you were on Twitter over the weekend, you may have seen a rip of the trailer for Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning. Intended to release alongside this week’s hot release of Top Gun: Maverick, Paramount’s gone and officially released the trailer for Tom Cruise’s next big action flick, and it looks even more ridiculous and bombastic than the previous two instalments.
It may have been over 20 years since the first Mission: Impossible movie hit screens, but the franchise has no signs of slowing down.
As our friends over at Lifehacker explain, if you’re a newcomer to the Mission: Impossible franchise, the good news is that it’s pretty easy to follow. The movies follow a fictional espionage agency named the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) who undertake, you know, impossible missions. The main character is Ethan Hunt, an IMF agent who leads a team of operatives on missions around the globe.
After six impossible missions, we still don’t know much about what’s happening in Dead Reckoning.
Directed and written again by Christopher McQuarrie, Dead Reckoning brings back Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt for a new mission that once again puts the world in mortal peril. There’s not much in the way of plot in this trailer, just music and visuals to sell the film’s big scope, along with a brief tease of some of the film’s bigger set pieces, including an underwater battle on a submarine. But the big stunt of the bunch is one we’ve been aware of for some time now: Cruise is going to ride a motorcycle off a mountain and (presumably) parachute or wingsuit to safety. And it definitely looks like something to be seen in theatres, if only for the sheer spectacle of it all.
It was reported previously that Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 are being planned as “a sendoff for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character”. Another insider called it a “culmination” of the series. Those two ideas aren’t exactly the same thing — the series could continue without Cruise, hypothetically.
Since Reckoning is intended to be the first of a two-part closer to Hunt’s saga, it’s bringing back some old faces from previous movies: in addition to Hunt’s team of Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), and Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), returning castmates include Vanessa Kirby’s White Widow from Fallout, along with Henry Czerny as Eugene Kittridge from the original film. New to the film are Marvel alums Pom Klementieff and Haley Atwell, beloved character actor Shea Whigham, and Esai Morales as the film’s primary baddie. Those characters are all expected to return for Dead Reckoning’s second instalment in 2024.
Mission: Impossible 7 is still a while away with Dead Reckoning Part One scheduled to release in Australian cinemas on July 13, 2023.
Dead Reckoning Part Two, which is also expected to be the final film in the franchise, has a tentative release date of July 28, 2024.
While you wait, you can catch Tom Cruise’s return to his other legacy film franchise Top Gun: Maverick, which is in cinemas this week. You can also check out our guide to every sci-fi, adventure, action or horror flick hitting cinemas in Australia this year.
This article has been updated since it was first published.