Another Mission: Impossible blockbuster. Another death-defying stunt by Tom Cruise. It has become, at this point, a crucial part of the marketing campaign—a behind-the-scenes documentary to prove that yes, Cruise is actually the guy hanging onto the plane, or throwing himself off the cliff, or scaling the side of a sheer glass building. Who needs CGI when we have Tom Cruise?
Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh movie in the Mission: Impossible franchise, is projected to earn $90 million stateside in its opening weekend, and $250 million globally. It's an excellent start for a movie that cost a staggering $290 million to make, thanks to delays from the COVID-19 pandemic.
It's become part of the movie's appeal—the filmmakers' insistence on shooting a massive Hollywood tentpole movie, that employed thousands of people, at a time when the theater-going experience was in danger of extinction. This is a movie that demands to be seen on the big screen, and the public has responded accordingly.
We're updating our feature on the Mission: Impossible franchise's best quality—the massive, large-scale missions that anchor each of these movies. The best parts of these missions is when something goes wrong—when random chance or unpredictable human messiness forces the team to improvise on the spot. Here is every mission in the Mission Impossible series, ranked.