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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands. Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands. Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands.

• Christopher McQuarrie
• Bruce Geller
• Erik Jendresen
• Hayley Atwell
• Ving Rhames
• 1.4K User reviews
• 358 Critic reviews
• 81 Metascore
• 17 wins & 64 nominations total

• Luther Stickell

• The White Widow

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• Trivia The frequent delays caused by COVID-19 ballooned the budget to $291 million, making it the most expensive Mission: Impossible film (surpassing Fallout, $178 million), the most expensive film of Tom Cruise 's career (again surpassing Fallout), and the most expensive film ever produced by Paramount (surpassing Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) , $217 million). The insurance company Chubb originally gave Paramount only £4.4 million (about $5.4 million) for the delays, arguing that the cast and crew could still fulfill their duties to the production despite being infected with COVID-19. Paramount sued Chubb in 2021, and the two companies settled in 2022. In 2023, Chubb gave Paramount a £57 million (about $71 million) payout for the COVID-caused delays, reducing the film's budget to about $220 million, which still makes it the most expensive film for Cruise, Paramount, and the franchise.
• Goofs Steam trains, especially moving at high speeds, need to be continuously provided with fuel, in this case coal. With the engineers killed and the controls opened all the way, the locomotive would have gradually slowed down and come to a halt as the pressure in the boiler dropped. That train would never have reached the bridge for that distance with no coal provided. Since the early 1900s, when firebox coal consumption exceeded the efforts of two men, the trains have used mechanical stokers. The coal would continue feeding without one missing coal shoveler.

[from trailer]

Eugene Kittridge : Your days of fighting for the so-called greater good are over. This is our chance to control the truth. The concepts of right and wrong for everyone for centuries to come. You're fighting to save an ideal that doesn't exist. Never did. You need to pick a side.

• Crazy credits Disclaimer as one of the last entries in the end titles scroll: "The production company would like to make it clear that at no point were vehicles driving on the Spanish Steps. These sequences were filmed at a set on a studio backlot."
• Connections Featured in WatchMojo: Top 10 Most Anticipated Franchises Returning in 2023 (2023)
• Soundtracks The Mission: Impossible Theme Written by Lalo Schifrin

User reviews 1.4K

• Jul 12, 2023
• How long is Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One? Powered by Alexa
• July 12, 2023 (United States)
• United States
• Official site
• Mission: Impossible 7
• Helsetkopen, Møre og Romsdal, Norway (motorcycle jump)
• Paramount Pictures
• Skydance Media
• TC Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $291,000,000 (estimated)
• $172,135,383
• $54,688,347
• Jul 16, 2023
• $567,535,383

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 43 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Digital

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Review: Tom Cruise is out to save the movies. Is ‘Mission: Impossible 7’ enough?

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It begins with a plunge into the icy deep, where a submarine is menaced by an invisible threat — a scene that induces shivery memories of “The Hunt for Red October” and “Das Boot” (and also triggers inevitable thoughts of a certain ill-fated submersible ). Then it shifts to a hot orange desert, billed as Arabia though it might as well be Arrakis , where a dust-storm pursuit gives way to some tricky sleight-of-sand. Ludicrously entertaining and even more ludicrously titled, “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” doesn’t just rack up the miles in style. Like so many globe-trotting thrillers and big-screen tourist brochures, it’s also a gleaming advertisement for Hollywood itself, a celebration and a reminder of how profoundly the movies have shaped our views of the world.

The task of saving that world once again falls to Ethan Hunt, a.k.a. Tom Cruise — and if the world can’t be saved, well, maybe at least the movies can. Or can they? Even if not, just try and stop Cruise, now 61, from taking the weight of the entire industry on his shoulders. His gargantuan cine-savior complex was apparent back in 2020, when he railed against COVID protocol violators on the U.K. set of “Dead Reckoning Part One,” captured in an audio recording that did not exactly self-destruct in five seconds. If the rant was overblown, this actor-producer is hardly alone in having bought into his own mythos: Earlier this year, Cruise was praised by none other than Steven Spielberg for having single-handedly “saved Hollywood’s ass” with the stunning success of “Top Gun: Maverick.”

Now, on the eve of this seventh “M:I” caper’s release, Cruise is playing the familiar role of the exhibitors’ evangelist, urging audiences on social media to seek out some of the summer’s biggest titles ( “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer”) in theaters. The cross-studio solidarity is touching; it also reflects some of the industry’s deep existential anxieties around moviemaking and moviegoing. No single picture, no matter how successful, is going to lay those anxieties to rest, though “Dead Reckoning Part One,” with its queasily apocalyptic stakes and enjoyably kinked-up plot, at least seems to be in conversation with some of the underlying issues. Is it a coincidence that this time around, the movie’s big bad villain is artificial intelligence?

That would be something called the “Entity” — no, not the horror-movie incubus that menaced Barbara Hershey back in 1982, but rather a frighteningly self-aware robo-weapon powerful enough to bring data systems, economies and entire nations to their knees. Ethan and his loyal Impossible Mission Force gizmo experts, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), are tasked with neutralizing this threat before it falls into the hands of the wrong country — which, as the movie cynically asserts, pretty much means any country. Fortunately, the Entity hasn’t reached Skynet levels of techno-malevolence yet; presumably that’s still to come in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two,” due out in theaters next year. For now, AI proves a frustratingly elusive phantom, one that acts primarily through a powerful human emissary, more devilish than angelic, named Gabriel (Esai Morales).

Flashbacks shed light on Gabriel and Ethan’s ugly, not always compelling history, which involves a confrontation, a betrayal and, surprise surprise, a beautiful dead woman. She’s a throwback to the many beautiful dead women from Ethan’s past, including three of his doomed IMF colleagues (played by Kristin Scott Thomas, Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė and Emmanuelle Béart) from the Brian De Palma-directed first “Mission: Impossible” feature (1996). Christopher McQuarrie, who directed the series’ two previous movies ( “Rogue Nation” and “Fallout” ) as well as both halves of “Dead Reckoning,” has a more restrained, less operatic visual style than De Palma (which could be said of most filmmakers). But in many respects he’s paying tribute to that 1996 caper, not only by staging a doozy of a runaway-train sequence, but also by reintroducing Ethan’s old IMF nemesis Eugene Kittridge, played once again by a banally sinister Henry Czerny.

Kittridge’s return can’t help but serve as a marker of how far Ethan, Cruise himself and this ever-durable series have come over nearly 30 years. It also suggests that the IMF, the utterly vital, eternally disavowable, brutally underloved bastard child of American intelligence, may not survive this latest and severest test of its abilities and resources. The “Dead” in the movie’s title certainly doesn’t bode well for anyone on-screen; neither does Ethan’s unnerving habit of reminding his closest colleagues that their survival means more to him than his own life. The sentiment may be cheesy, to the point where you half expect Ethan to pull off his latex mask and reveal Vin Diesel underneath. But it also reminds you that the “Mission: Impossible” movie franchise began with Ethan being framed for his teammates’ coolly premeditated murders, a formative trauma that he has never fully shaken off.

For the record:

10:50 a.m. July 5, 2023 An earlier version of this review said Tom Cruise’s character maneuvered a yellow Beetle through the streets of Rome in one scene. It was a yellow Fiat.

It’s enough to make you fear for Ethan’s closest allies, among them Luther, Benji and the always-on-the-run Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), all of whom are put in varying degrees of escalating danger as the typically serpentine narrative leaps from one spectacular piece of on-location fight choreography to the next. Notably, Ethan also finds himself a new sparring partner named Grace (a terrific Hayley Atwell), a wily thief who first pops up during an undercover operation at the Abu Dhabi airport before taking Ethan on a harrowing, sometimes hilarious ride (by yellow Fiat) through the streets of Rome. That Italian escapade soon leads to another in spooky nighttime Venice, where, in tight alleys and on haunted canals, the combat takes on a murderous close-quarters intimacy.

The quality of the action here is, for the most part, more fluid and satisfying than jaw-dropping; there’s nothing here to rival De Palma’s snazziest set pieces, or Ethan’s vertiginous climb up the walls of the Burj Khalifa in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” (2011), or his men’s room demolition derby in 2018’s “Fallout.” But McQuarrie’s typically fastidious writing (undertaken this time with Erik Jendresen) makes up for whatever his direction may lack in sheer verve. And he does pull off one major cinematic coup: a triumphantly visceral, spatially disorienting, pull-out-the-stops ripsnorter of a climax that seems designed to ensure that no one dares set a movie aboard the Orient Express ever again, for fear of inviting unfavorable comparisons.

There’s more to the story, of course, which, though relatively fleeting at 163 minutes, feels generously overstuffed for a first-parter. I haven’t yet mentioned Pom Klementieff’s role as Paris, a lethally lithe newcomer of mysterious motives, killer threads and very few words. Or Vanessa Kirby, who, reprising her “Fallout” role as a ruthless arms dealer, has only to sit in a train car with a smartphone to deliver the movie’s single most impressive performance.

Maybe that’s unfair to Cruise, who once again suffers for our pleasure like no one else, hurling himself and his motorcycle from great heights, fighting in claustrophobically tight spaces and, yes, running and running and running some more. For all that, he knows how to temper his usual superhuman self-seriousness with lightness and wit. He’s even gracious enough to cede some of the spotlight to his co-stars this time around, spending a fair chunk of the movie’s endgame amusingly on the sidelines. He returns for the big-bang finish, of course, in a spirit of goofy optimism and eternal vigilance. “Dead Reckoning Part One” ends on his watch, but the movies will not.

‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’

Rating: PG-13, for intense sequences of violence and action, some language and suggestive material

Running time: 2 hours, 43 minutes

Playing: Starts July 12 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Breaking down the trailer for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt in a teaser for the action sequel. But who are all these people joining him for this latest impossible mission?

Senior Writer

Tom Cruise is back to battle baddies as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (out July 14, 2023), and the teaser trailer for this seventh film in the franchise was released today. Which new characters are joining our hero for his latest extremely difficult task? Which old ones are back from previous adventures? And does it feature the sight of Tom Cruise running? (Spoiler alert: it does!). You can read our full breakdown of the trailer below.

Welcome back to the world of Mission: Impossible!

Directed by longtime Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, the shoot for the new Mission: Impossible film took place in numerous locales, including the U.K., Italy, and Abu Dhabi. The opening moments of the trailer emphasize the globe-trotting nature of the movie as we see horses racing through a desert, a car hurtling through a European street, and a bike being ridden through some beautiful, likely British, countryside. We also see Ethan Hunt getting physical with some goons at the kind of super-cool nightclub that has never actually existed outside of the movies.

The return of Kittridge

The first half of the trailer features the voice of none other than actor Henry Czerny who played the character of Impossible Mission Force director Eugene Kittridge way back in Brian De Palma's original 1996 Mission: Impossible and has now returned to seemingly dissuade Hunt from his impossible mission-completing ways. "Your days of fighting for the so-called greater good are over," Kittridge says. "This is our chance to control the truth, the concepts of right and wrong for everyone for centuries to come. You're fighting to save an ideal that doesn't exist, never did. You need to pick a side."

Introducing the big bad

While Kittridge intones, we are introduced to some of the cast who are joining the franchise this time around including Esai Morales, who appears to be playing the film's villain (or one of them, anyway). Nicholas Hoult was originally cast in the role portrayed by Morales but, in March 2020, Variety reported that he was leaving the project because the movie's COVID-caused delays had caused a scheduling conflict for the Fury Road actor. Morales' previous credits include NYPD Blue and Ozark .

Look, it's Hayley Atwell!

The first half of the trailer also introduces, briefly, the characters played by Guardians of the Galaxy franchise star Pom Klementieff and her fellow Marvel star Hayley Atwell. Little is known at present about who either actress is playing but on the Light the Fuse podcast McQuarrie described Atwell's character as "a destructive force of nature." Later on in the trailer, we see another M:I newbie, Shea Whigham, from Boardwalk Empire and The Wolf of Wall Street . In an interview with the Radio Times earlier in the year, Whigham revealed that he is playing a character called Jasper Briggs, who is on the hunt for Hunt, and that he will also appear in the film's sequel. "You'll see over the course of seven and eight why I'm trying to track Ethan Hunt," he said. "It's one of the best things I've ever got a chance to be a part of."

Cruise close-up

We finally get a good look at our hero, Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt, who really doesn't seem to be taking Kittridge's lecture well. Then again, Hunt has good reason to be suspicious of people who present themselves as colleagues, with Henry Cavill's August Walker in 2018's Mission: Impossible – Fallout just being the most recent example of a character not to be trusted (although that mustache really should have tipped-off Ethan from the start).

The gang's all here!

In the course of the franchise, Hunt has gathered a band of collaborators seen here. Simon Pegg first played Benji Dunn in 2006's Mission: Impossible III ; Rhames' Luther was introduced in the very first film; and Rebecca Ferguson's MI6 agent Ilsa Faust arrived in 2015's Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation .

Training-day

One of the film's major action set-pieces takes place on a train, which can be taken as both a homage to Brian De Palma's original film and a reminder that there aren't many means of transportation that have not now featured in the franchise.

Leap of faith

The trailer saves its most spectacular sight for the last moment as we see Cruise's character ride a motorbike off a cliff. At last August's CinemaCon, Paramount showed footage of Cruise working with stuntmen to prepare to fly off the bike in mid-air and parachute to the ground. Writer-director McQuarrie called it not only the biggest stunt in the movie, but "by far the most dangerous stunt we've ever done."

Watch the trailer for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One below.

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• Tom Cruise says iconic Mission: Impossible vault scene nearly didn't happen because stunt was too hard
• Why Top Gun: Maverick starts exactly the same way as the original film

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Tom Cruise ‘s seventh globe-trotting journey as Ethan Hunt will be called “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.”

Paramount Pictures revealed the tentpole’s official title during its Thursday presentation at CinemaCon , the annual trade show for theater owners. Cruise, who is usually a regular presence at the convention in Las Vegas, wasn’t in attendance. Though in fairness, he attended last year’s CinemaCon to talk up the death-defying stunts in “ Mission: Impossible 7 ” before the movie’s release date was pushed back by a year due to COVID-19. At that time, he was most excited about driving a motorcycle off a cliff in Norway, an antic he called “far and away the most dangerous thing I’ve attempted.”

Audiences got a sneak preview of that anxiety-inducing moment — and more — in the high-stakes trailer, which hasn’t been made available to the public. His stunts have gotten so outrageous that everyone in the room laughed when Ethan Hunt nose dives off a cliff while on his motorcycle and then free-falls into the abyss. General audiences will be able to watch the teaser in front of “Top Gun: Maverick,” which hits theaters on May 27.

Though plot details for “MI7” are mostly ambiguous, Hunt and his team of operatives are again faced with an existential threat. The trailer was stuffed with action-packed footage, including vintage-looking trains flying off tracks, deadly emerald-colored clouds of biochemical weapons, and plenty of brutal street combat.

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“You’re fighting to save an ideal that doesn’t exist…. never did,” Henry Czerny’s character Eugene Kittridge, the former director of the IMF, tells Hunt. “You need to pick a side.”

Since he was not at Caesars Palace, Cruise sent along a pre-recorded video that was basically unintelligible because the actor was hanging from an airplane. “Please enjoy,” he told the audience. “And hey! Let’s try to have a great summer.”

Cruise loomed large over Paramount’s three-hour presentation; the studio devoted nearly the entire time to screening his other high-profile blockbuster, “Top Gun: Maverick,” a sequel to the 1986 action adventure. Thursday’s screening marks the first time a wide audience will see the movie, which is going to the Cannes Film Festival next month.

Christopher McQuarrie returns to direct “Mission: Impossible – 7” after steering the franchise’s fifth and sixth installment — 2015’s “Rogue Nation” and 2018’s “Fallout.” The latter became the highest-grossing entry in the long-running series, grossing nearly $800 million at the global box office.

The “Mission: Impossible” films have grossed over $3.5 billion at the worldwide box office since 1996. The popular spy series hit a low with 2006’s “Mission: Impossible III,” which generated only $398 million worldwide. But Cruise successfully revived the property with 2011’s “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” which earned $695 million globally and stood as the top-earning entry until “Fallout” was released.

Along with Cruise, who once again stars as an IMF agent known to occasionally hang off airplanes and skyscrapers, “MI” veterans Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby and Frederick Schmidt will also return. Newcomers to the franchise include Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, Esai Morales, Rob Delaney, Charles Parnell, Indira Varma, Mark Gatiss and Cary Elwes.

“MI7,” which has been delayed several times during the pandemic, is scheduled to open in theaters on July 14, 2023. “Dead Reckoning Part Two,” as it will presumably be called, is set to be released on June 28, 2024.

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'Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning' ending: You won't believe who dies (Spoilers!)

Spoiler alert! The following post discusses important plot points and the ending of “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” so beware if you haven’t seen it yet.

In the latest “Mission: Impossible” movie, Tom Cruise’s superspy Ethan Hunt keeps the world safe yet again – at least for now, and things aren’t looking great! – but also gets put through the emotional wringer more than usual.

Director Chris McQuarrie’s “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” (in theaters now), the seventh outing in the action franchise, teams Ethan and his loyal friends Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) with skilled thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) to stop a rogue artificial intelligence called The Entity. Two halves of a key are integral to either destroying or controlling the AI, and Ethan’s mission – which he totally chooses to accept – is not only to get it but also find out what it unlocks. 

Let’s break down the action-packed finale, plus who’s joining the team and who’s out of the picture permanently:

What happens at the end of the new ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie?

A race between Ethan’s team and the mysterious Gabriel (Esai Morales) – The Entity’s right-hand man in the real world and a guy from Ethan’s past – leads to a showdown on the runaway Orient Express, where a business deal to obtain the key goes down. Gabriel winds up with the key but during a nasty fight on the top of the speeding transport, Gabriel escapes and jumps to safety before detonating a bridge that the train is quickly approaching.

Good news is Ethan secretly swiped the key from Gabriel but bad news is they have to navigate train cars falling to their doom before ultimately being saved by Gabriel’s assassin henchwoman Paris (Pom Klementieff), left wounded after her boss tried to kill her. Paris tells Ethan that the key is to The Entity’s source code on a Russian submarine sitting at the bottom of the icy Bering Sea, Ethan parachutes out before the authorities can grab him, and meets up with Benji because they have an underwater mission in their near future.

Who’s the newest member of the team in ‘Dead Reckoning’?

Grace was hired by black marketeer White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) to obtain one of the key halves, but surviving a bonkers cars chase in Rome, almost dying in Venice and being embraced by the good guys leads the criminal to (somewhat reluctantly) put her faith and safety in Ethan’s hands. He recruits her to his Impossible Mission Force crew and at the end, when Ethan bolts and she’s face to face with CIA Director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), Grace accepts this new role and he recognizes her skills that he can use.

She doesn’t become a hero as much as “she just grows a conscience,” Atwell tells USA TODAY. “She wants to believe that (these) are the right people to trust and for her to actually be part of something that's more than just self-serving. And it's now sacrificial because the cost of caring about someone is the risk of losing them now is greater. It's like her heart thaws and she becomes more humane.”

'Be the student': Hayley Atwell talks lessons from Tom Cruise in 'Mission: Impossible 7'

Does anyone important die in ‘Mission: Impossible 7’?

Well, the American director of national intelligence (played by Cary Elwes) is assassinated by Gabriel, though he was a bad guy who wanted The Entity. But longtime fans of the franchise get a major gut punch in “Dead Reckoning”: Because he’s all about making Ethan suffer, Gabriel promises that either Grace or ex-MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a love interest and helpful ally to Ethan, will die. Ilsa saves Grace and confronts Gabriel in Venice, taking out her sword to face the knife-wielding villain, but he fatally sinks his blade into her chest. Ethan sprints along the canals though he doesn’t get to Ilsa in time to save her.

Ilsa’s death was “a really tough decision,” McQuarrie says. “But it was one we knew we had to make for the movie to have stakes and for the movie to remain ‘Mission.’ 'Mission' is primarily Ethan's journey (and) there is this continuum that the people closest to him, he tends to lose them. It was a really tricky conversation for us to have, and we knew that there would be some reactions to that, but we also knew this is the reality of the world that's been created over seven movies.”

'Mission: Impossible 7' review: Tom Cruise fights AI in fun, far-fetched 'Dead Reckoning'

Is there a ‘Dead Reckoning’ post-credits scene?

Nope! Unlike superhero movies and other blockbusters, the “Mission: Impossible” films have avoided teases and stingers and that tradition continues with the new adventure. But an action-packed climax and a lingering shot of a sunken sub are really all you need to get psyched for “Dead Reckoning Part Two” (out June 28, 2024). 

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Cruise control: An homage to the relentless reliability of 'Mission: Impossible'

Linda Holmes

Tom Cruise returns again (and again, and again, and again) as Ethan Hunt in the latest Mission: Impossible film — Dead Reckoning Part One. Christian Black/Paramount Pictures and Skydance hide caption

Tom Cruise returns again (and again, and again, and again) as Ethan Hunt in the latest Mission: Impossible film — Dead Reckoning Part One.

More than Marvel or DC, more than Jurassic World , maybe even more than James Bond with its revolving 007s, the Mission: Impossible franchise runs on its ability to meet expectations. Not just any expectations — high expectations. People go in wanting top-flight action, beautiful locations, a modest amount of melancholy character business about Ethan Hunt's mounting personal losses, Tom Cruise doing a lot of his own stunts, and an uncomplicated story in which a bad guy has (or wants) something and a good guy has to go get it. And that's exactly what they get.

And unlike Fast & Furious , this franchise hasn't shape-shifted over and over. It has remained remarkably stable at its core, despite taking several films to settle on writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and changing up the women in Hunt's life every movie or two.

'Mission: Impossible' is back, but will you accept it, or will it self-destruct?

It is axiomatic even within this universe that the idea of the government's underground "Impossible Mission Force" is absurd; the films have even started having characters comment on it. It also seems unlikely that Hunt would be forever on the edge of being disowned and deemed a traitor, given that no human being has ever been forced to demonstrate his trustworthiness so many times. If there were really a spy like Hunt — he flies helicopters! he climbs skyscrapers! he does close-up magic! — you have to assume he would be popular with spy leadership instead of constantly seeming like he's at risk of a negative performance review. But these things are utterly unimportant, because I know them going in, and the fact that they make no sense (and repeat over and over) is a given.

In fact, I'm not sure anything has ever really surprised me in one of these movies, which might seem contradictory given that they are, in part, "thrillers." By the time an M:I guy who has seemed to be a good guy is revealed as a stealth bad guy, you've probably spent a good amount of time thinking, "Who's the stealth bad guy in this movie? Oh, I bet it's him." There don't tend to be complex motivations behind any of what happens; the villains are generally just kind of international dirtbags who have something they shouldn't. A list, a bioweapon (twice!), some launch codes, some data and of course, the sentimental favorite: big shiny balls of plutonium. In the case of the new installment Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One , the battle is over two halves of a key that, in some gauzily defined way, can be combined to stop a godlike AI spoken of only as ... The Entity.

This all probably sounds like criticism, and it emphatically is not. Talking about the predictability or thinness of a story in a Mission: Impossible movie is like talking about the nutrition information on a box of Pop-Tarts — if you were focused on this aspect of the thing you are about to consume, you would have chosen something else. The story of The Entity is somehow vague and overexplained, not to mention unpleasantly adjacent to a kind of "tech as replacement for an all-knowing God" attitude that the movie doesn't actually care about, and that it doesn't really give the audience much reason to care about either. And that turns out to be completely fine.

Hayley Atwell and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One . Christian Black/Paramount Pictures and Skydance hide caption

Hayley Atwell and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One .

Because what Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One cares about is jumping a motorcycle off a mountain and then creating, though its marketing, an entire sub-narrative about the 60+ action star who trained to do the stunt himself and shot it on day one so they wouldn't waste any money if he died . What it cares about is a train dangling from a mountain. A car chase that is as witty and inventive as any you'll see anywhere. A fabulous race through an airport full of glass walls. Refreshing the cast with a woman as charming as Hayley Atwell, who is wonderfully entertaining as a scrappy pickpocket named Grace. Relying on Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, as Benji and Luther, to anchor the Impossible Mission Force team.

Movie Reviews

Tom cruise hangs on for dear life to his 'mission' to save the movies.

The biggest problem (if there is one) with Dead Reckoning is not its story, per se, but how much time it spends explaining it. It's worth noting that, as with action blockbusters generally, these films have gotten longer ... and longer ... and longer. At around two hours and 45 minutes, Dead Reckoning is roughly an hour longer than the original Mission: Impossible . It tries heroically to avoid dragging by featuring such genuinely exciting and inventive action sequences. But two hours and 45 minutes is a long time to sit in a seat having your needs met, and every time the film slows down to discuss (1) The Entity (a term that sounds sillier and sillier with repetition), (2) the keys, where they've been, and what they may open, or (3) the entire concept of a godlike AI and what it might be able to do, it gets a little ... well, fast-forwardable for future home viewers.

But again, this is what one expects. It is film as both exquisitely crafted entertainment and ruthless consumerism, fulfilling the order made at the counter with the certainty of fast-food fries that will always be the same – and will always be good.

There is some cost to this. For whatever reason, Mission: Impossible avoids the questions that are so often asked about Marvel movies in particular, about what Ryan Coogler or Chloé Zhao would be doing if they weren't making superhero movies, or about what the actors would be doing if they weren't tied into these franchises for years. Tom Cruise has mostly stopped doing the more intimate projects in comedy and drama that he did earlier in his career; he's a three-time acting Oscar nominee who pretty much does just action blockbusters now. He seems thrilled and delighted to be in this half-actor half-stuntman lane, and at 61, that's certainly his right. But there doesn't seem to be, for instance, another Magnolia in his future.

I do worry that having one's expectations precisely met – neither exceeded nor even simply upended – is becoming the only way to get people into theaters. Yes, perhaps we will take a risk for something at home that we can always turn off if we don't like it. But to get audiences to a theater, does a film need to be a sequel or a piece of IP or a franchise like this that delivers and satisfies, as neatly as a bed with hospital corners? There are signs that we're not quite there yet; Everything Everywhere All at Once did great, for instance, and an expectation-meeter it was not. But I worry about the longer-term difficulty of getting people into theaters to see something more ... well, more weird (not that all the Entity talk doesn't get a little weird).

Seeing a movie that is so very good at doing what it promises drives home that point that it takes both movies that do what they promise and movies that do something you couldn't have anticipated to make up an industry that thrives.

This piece also appeared in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what's making us happy.

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• mission impossible

Here's Where to Watch and Stream 'Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning' Starring Tom Cruise

The latest title in the action movie franchise also stars Hayley Atwell and Rebecca Ferguson.

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Flash forward, to 2023, when the seventh movie in the iconic franchise is now out. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One sees Ethan face an opponent that is threatening to take over the world: an artificial intelligence called "The Entity." As he enlists a number of people to help him take down this out-of-the-box nemesis (including Marvel 's Hayley Atwell and Silo actress Rebecca Ferguson ), he needs to save the world before it gets destroyed by something no one could have ever predicted more than two decades earlier.

Given how this film already has a legion of fans behind it, there's a good chance folks will want to know how to watch and stream Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One online. Thankfully, we discovered one clue that will make solving this mission much easier. Here's where to watch and stream Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One online:

Where to watch and stream Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One:

Presently, the only place you can catch Tom performing mind-bending stunts is by heading to the local movie theater. But based on where the rest of the Mission: Impossible franchise is currently streaming online, it's highly plausible to think that the latest film in the series will land there too.

Every Mission: Impossible movie made has been distributed by Paramount Pictures, including the seventh installment. Since the media conglomerate also has its own streaming site Paramount+, it made sense for all the films to eventually be available for viewing over there. If Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One follows suit, longtime fans can expect it to live on Paramount+ as well .

'Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One'

When it comes to an exact streaming release date for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One , that's currently a waiting game. Paramount Pictures typically drops their latest releases between 30 to 45 days after hitting the box office. If the pattern sticks, then it's likely folks can watch it come Labor Day weekend in early September.

As for how to watch and stream Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One on Paramount+, it's essential to sign up for an account first. The streamer offers a 30-day free trial before choosing one of its plans which start at $5.99 per month or $59.99 per year . Once that's done, you can click on the movie's title on the Paramount+ website or the Paramount+ app .

While you're at it, why don't you have a movie marathon and watch the other Mission: Impossible movies in order ? After all, you'll need to get a sense of the death defying missions Ethan is famous for ahead of his latest heart-pumping venture. Happy watching!

@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-o9j0dn:before{margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-right:0.625rem;color:#ffffff;width:1.25rem;bottom:-0.2rem;height:1.25rem;content:'_';display:inline-block;position:relative;line-height:1;background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-o9j0dn:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/goodhousekeeping/static/images/Clover.5c7a1a0.svg);}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.loaded .css-o9j0dn:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/goodhousekeeping/static/images/Clover.5c7a1a0.svg);}} The Best Movies to Watch

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Mission: Impossible 7 streaming on Paramount Plus, but with a new title

It is now possible to watch Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning on Paramount Plus.

The wait to stream Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is now over, as the seventh entry in Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible franchise is now available to stream on Paramount Plus to all subscribers in the US and Canada; UK and other markets will see the movie land on the streaming service in February.

However, there is a slight tweak to the movie as it arrives on streaming: a title change. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is dropping the "Part One" and is now just referred to as Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning .

This comes as Mission: Impossible 8 , previously titled Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two , is going to receive a new, as yet unknown title. Though the title is changing, the upcoming movie is still going to conclude the story that began in Dead Reckoning .

To that note, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning saw Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his IMF team go up against a dangerous new foe, an AI system known as The Entity that can distort the truth and anticipate its enemies' most logical moves. In order to stop The Entity, Ethan must prevent its human representative, Gabriel, from acquiring a key that could give The Entity immeasurable power.

• Read : Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning ending explained

In addition to Cruise, Mission: Impossible staples Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Rebecca Ferguson returned for the movie, as did other franchise veterans Vanessa Kirby and Henry Czerny. New to the franchise were Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning received strong reviews, including a five-star review from What to Watch . It has been available to watch at-home via digital on-demand platforms for a while now (and still is), but its debut on Paramount Plus is the first time that it is available on any streaming platform at no additional cost. All you need is a Paramount Plus subscription and you can watch Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning right now.

In fact, you can now watch all seven Mission: Impossible movies on Paramount Plus.

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That will have to satisfy Mission: Impossible fans for the time being, as Mission: Impossible 8 is going to take a bit longer to arrive than originally planned. Previously, the movie had been dated for a June 2024 release, about a year after Dead Reckoning premiered in movie theaters. However, due to productions being shut down in 2023 because of the multiple strikes in Hollywood over new labor agreements, Mission: Impossible 8 has been delayed to May 23, 2025.

Michael Balderston is a DC-based entertainment and assistant managing editor for What to Watch, who has previously written about the TV and movies with TV Technology, Awards Circuit and regional publications. Spending most of his time watching new movies at the theater or classics on TCM, some of Michael's favorite movies include Casablanca , Moulin Rouge! , Silence of the Lambs , Children of Men , One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Star Wars . On the TV side he enjoys Only Murders in the Building, Yellowstone, The Boys, Game of Thrones and is always up for a Seinfeld rerun. Follow on Letterboxd .

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Screen Rant

Tom cruise films london protest scene for mission: impossible 8 in new set video.

Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg film a hectic scene together in a new Mission: Impossible 8 set video, which shows the pair amidst a protest in London.

• Tom Cruise hugs Simon Pegg as a crowd protests around them in a new Mission: Impossible 8 set video.
• The scene is filmed in London and features a heavy police presence.
• Whether Mission: Impossible 8 is the last entry in the franchise probably depends on how well it performs at the box office.

A new Mission: Impossible 8 set video shows Tom Cruise filming a scene in the middle of a large London protest. After first playing superspy Ethan Hunt back in 1996, Cruise has returned for six sequels, the most recent of which, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning , came out last summer. The movie star is reteaming with director Christopher McQuarrie for an upcoming eighth film, which has now been filming on and off for essentially two years.

As the planned Mission: Impossible 8 release date approaches, a new video shared by UnBoxPHD on YouTube shows Cruise and costar Simon Pegg, who plays Benji, filming a scene together in London as a protest kicks off around them.

Click here to see the Mission: Impossible 8 Set Video

The video, which is available at the link above, shows Cruise and Benji embracing each other before walking off through the crowd as a cameraman captures the action. Extras can be seen pumping their fists in the air and looking angry, though the context of the protest is not yet clear. There's also a heavy police presence in the scene, with London officers shown in the background holding rifles.

10 Biggest Details & Reveals From Mission: Impossible 8's Set Photos & Videos

Will mission: impossible 8 be the last one, what tom cruise has said about the franchise's future.

Originally, Mission: Impossible 8 had the Dead Reckoning: Part Two subtitle, with the film serving as a continuation of last summer's sequel. When the seventh film underperformed at the box office, however, this subtitle was dropped, and the next installment now doesn't have an official title. Though the Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning reviews were glowing from critics and audiences, the somewhat muted box office (due in part to the behemoth that was Oppenheimer and Barbie 's dual release) has evidently resulted in a bit of a course correction, the extent of which remains to be seen.

There was talk before the release of Mission: Impossible 7 that the eighth installment could serve as the last, but this was never officially confirmed. Cruise himself said last summer that he hopes to continue making new entries in the franchise until he's nearly 80. McQuarrie, too, said last June that there are already ideas for Mission: Impossible 9 and potentially beyond . These comments, however, were before the seventh movie failed to meet expectations.

Cruise is expected to appear in the in-development Top Gun 3 and is gearing up to make a movie aboard the I.S.S. in outer space. If Mission: Impossible 9 does happen, it could be a number of years away.

Unlike the cliffhanger Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning ending , it seems likely that the next movie will feature a more definitive conclusion for Ethan and his team . This way, if the movie is met with a more muted box office response, it can serve as the final chapter if need be. If Mission: Impossible 8 is a success, however, it seems very likely that Cruise and McQuarrie will team up for yet another action-packed adventure.

Source: UnBoxPHD

Mission: Impossible 8

Mission: Impossible 8 is the direct sequel to Dead Reckoning - Part One and is the eighth film in the Mission: Impossible franchise. Said to be the final film, Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and more will reprise their roles in Ethan Hunt's IMF team as they face off against a dangerous foe from their past.

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My Impossible Mission to Find Tom Cruise

The action star has gone to great lengths to avoid the press for more than a decade. But maybe our writer could track him down anyway?

Credit... Illustration by Kelsey Dake

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By Caity Weaver

• Published July 17, 2023 Updated July 31, 2023

In an interview with Playboy in 2012, Tom Cruise described Katie Holmes as “an extraordinary person” with a “wonderful” clothing line, and someone for whom he was fond of “doing things like creating romantic dinners” — behavior that, he confided, “she enjoys.” It would prove to be his last major interview with a reporter to date. Despite what may be recalled through the penumbra of memory, this sudden silence was not directly preceded by either of Cruise’s infamous appearances on television: not by his NBC’s “Today” show interview (in which he labeled host Matt Lauer both “glib” and “Matt — MattMattMattMatt”), nor even by his appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (in which he reverse-catapulted himself onto Winfrey’s fawn-colored couch multiple times in a demonstration of his enthusiasm for Holmes). Those incidents occurred seven years earlier, in 2005; Cruise emerged from the hex of public bewilderment unscathed. In fact, Cruise gave no indication that the interview, pegged to the musical-comedy bomb “Rock of Ages,” was intended to serve as a farewell address to journalists. At the time he sat for it, another life milestone was hurtling toward him: The month after the article was published, Holmes filed for divorce.

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In the decade since, the amount of verified information we have gleaned about Cruise’s real life could fit on a single flashcard, though it’s unclear why anyone would need to memorize it, since the details mainly consist of anecdotal trifles shared by other celebrities in interviews of their own: From James Corden, we know Cruise once asked to land a helicopter in James Corden’s yard . From Brooke Shields, we know Brooke Shields no longer receives the (by all accounts delectable) white chocolate coconut Bundt cake that Cruise famously sends to many beloved stars each holiday season. From Kyra Sedgwick, we know that there was a panic button under a fireplace mantle in one of Cruise’s homes . (She pressed it out of curiosity, summoning the police.) From Matt Damon, we know that during production of the fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie, Cruise had “a safety guy” replaced because he deemed a proposed stunt (in which Cruise scampers over the Burj Khalifa) “too dangerous.” Tom Cruise, Kate Hudson informs us, loves skydiving.

These facts sketch a portrait of a daredevil with a finite budget for cakes, but hardly a recluse. Cruise’s spurning of interviews makes him unique among his cohort — A-list, pathologically charismatic, wrest-butts-into-seats-type movie stars — whose success, it has long been assumed, derives from their ability to appear likable to mortals. They demonstrate this skill, traditionally, by exhibiting their personality in interviews. Every time Cruise turns down an interview request (through his representative, Cruise declined to be interviewed for this article), he makes a bet that just his being Tom Cruise, offering no further details about what that might entail, is enticement enough for people to watch his movies. Lately, more often than not, he has been right.

To see this clearly, perhaps it’s helpful to contrast Cruise’s career with that of Brad Pitt, his co-star in “Interview With the Vampire” (1994) and fellow member of a declining species: Hollywood leading men. Pitt has continued appearing in the kind of films (thrillers, comedies, romances, psychodramas, historical epics, etc.) that he and Cruise starred in throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In the past decade, audiences could find Pitt endeavoring to disappear into roles ranging from abolitionist to astronaut. In the same period, Cruise has starred solely in action films, which have depicted him fighting aliens, terrorists, fellow spies, a mummy and sundry other enemies of the United States. Rather than vanishing into roles, Cruise remakes them in his image. So fully has he melded his offscreen persona with that of the skydiving, cliff-jumping, motorcycle-parachuting pilots he portrays, these characters become mere receptacles of Tom Cruiseness. Cruise’s films tend to perform better than Pitt’s at the box office; his most recent endeavor, “Top Gun: Maverick,” outearned Pitt’s latest by about $1.4 billion. This summer, Tom Cruise will run, drive and jump at top speeds in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” and Brad Pitt will star in nothing.

Cruise still takes part in promotional junkets and convivial late-night-talk-show chats, but his refusal to participate in the sort of in-depth journalistic interviews that (in theory, anyway) reveal some aspect of his true self has coincided, somewhat paradoxically, with an incredible surge in his commitment to infusing cinematic fantasies with reality. For unknown reasons it could be interesting to explore in an interview, reality has become very important to Cruise, who reveres it as a force more powerful than magic. It is vital to Cruise that the audience of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” have the opportunity to witness not a C.G.I. production of a feat, or even a seasoned stunt performer executing a dangerous act, but real footage of him, Tom Cruise, the 61-year-old father of three from Syracuse, N.Y., riding a motorcycle off a cliff.

This fetish for reality has become a keystone of Cruise’s persona, to the extent that many of his public appearances now take place in flying vehicles. Rather than accept an MTV Movie & TV Award in person in May, Cruise filmed his acceptance speech from the cockpit of a fighter aircraft as he piloted it through clouds, politely shouting, “I love entertaining you!” over the engine’s roar. Delivering “a special message from the set of @MissionImpossible” to his followers on Instagram, Cruise screamed while dangling backward off the side of an aircraft, “It truly is the honor of a lifetime!”

But reality does not exist only in movies. What is missing from Cruise’s fervid documentation of ultrarisky, inconceivably expensive, meticulously planned real-life events are any details about the parts of his real life that do not involve, for example, filming stunts for “Mission: Impossible” movies. My own mission, then, was simple: I was to travel to the ends of the Earth to see if it was possible to locate the terrestrial Cruise, out of context — to catch a glimpse, to politely shout one question at him, or at least to ascertain one new piece of intelligence about his current existence — in order to reintegrate him into our shared reality.

Having lately made an effort to scrutinize any article that cast Tom Cruise as its subject, one of the few things that I can say for certain he has done since 2021, besides film two “Mission: Impossible” movies, is order chicken tikka masala from a restaurant in Birmingham, England, and then “as soon as he had finished” (per a tweet from the restaurant ) order the exact same chicken tikka masala “all over again.”

These days, Tom Cruise is hardly ever photographed in any situation other than shooting and promoting his films. (He was filming in Birmingham.) The paucity of paparazzi photos of the apparently chicken-loving actor can be at least partly attributed to his spending much time removed from America’s twin celebrity-entertainment control rooms: New York (where his ex-wife, Holmes, lives with their daughter) and Los Angeles (where, in 2015 and 2016, he reportedly sold multiple homes for a combined total just over $50 million). Years of speculation that Cruise lives or was planning to live in a penthouse apartment a five-minute walk from the “spiritual headquarters” of the Church of Scientology, of which he is a big fan, in Clearwater, Fla., appear never to have been realized, apart from an unsourced assertion published in The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, which mentioned that the audition process for co-stars in Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick” “involved flying down to Cruise’s home in Clearwater. ”

To learn more about the possible activities of Tom Cruise, I turned to the person who, after Cruise himself, his family, his friends, his employees, his co-workers and anyone who has ever met — or, at least, interacted with — him, knows him best: a Brazilian woman who is quite possibly his most dedicated fan in the world. She spoke to me on two conditions: first, that I grant her anonymity; second, that I not identify by name, or characterize too specifically, the publicly available online repository of Cruise-related information she has maintained for over 20 years. Her concerns are both practical and legal: Practically, she isn’t sure if the operation, which may or may not play host to more than 132,000 images of Cruise, could withstand a large influx of traffic; legally, she did not wish to invite the scrutiny and possible copyright claims the attention might draw.

She started the operation when she was 18. Today she is in her early 40s and works as a librarian. More than two decades into the endeavor, a nostalgic melancholy permeates the fan’s reflections. Ten years ago, she said, she was often the first to widely disseminate the latest images of Cruise. Now, because of the superabundance of photo-sharing social media accounts, she must settle for merely having the most complete repository. New additions trickle in sporadically. She’s partial to the theory that paparazzi rarely capture photographs of Cruise in part because he is a real-life “master of disguise,” whom people fail to recognize on the street. Despite years of remote observation, of scrutinizing nearly every single image captured of the man, even she could not say definitively where Cruise lives. She did observe, however, that he appears to spend “most of the time” in Britain.

In fact, there is a strange rumor that Cruise bought a home in a tiny town called Biggin Hill, on the farthest fringes of London — the site of a small private airport that he has been known to use when filming in the region. The legend appears to trace back to an article published in the British tabloid The Sun in July 2021 about the actor’s 59th-birthday celebration. An anonymous source declared that Cruise had “only recently moved to” a house in Biggin Hill (average home price: £590,000), “which feels like it’s practically in the countryside.” The claim would accrue scant new details as it was repeated in British papers numerous times over the following year, apart from one: that Cruise’s residence “is set in 140 acres of stunning rural parkland,” inside a posh gated community near the airport.

Cruise, who has filmed parts of the three most recent installments of “Mission: Impossible” in Britain, has never publicly commented on the rumors. He did, however, confirm that he spends “a lot of time in Britain” in an exceedingly rare interview that appeared, inexplicably, in the September 2022 issue of Derbyshire Life magazine. “I guess I am an Anglophile,” Cruise told Derbyshire Life. “I love being in Britain because everyone is pleasant and will give you a nod or say hello without crowding you too much.” Elsewhere in the interview, Cruise expressed additional enthusiasm for auxiliary British topics, including politeness (“Being friendly doesn’t cost a bean, and I enjoy it”) and Derbyshire, which is, for the record, actually a considerable distance from Biggin Hill (“Wow! Derbyshire — what a fantastic place!”).

To determine if anyone who did not work in the British newspaper or chicken-tikka-masala industries had ever encountered Cruise on English soil, I sifted through Facebook posts, typing any permutation of “saw Tom Cruise” I could think of into the search bars of neighborhood groups for all of the Hobbit-ily named localities surrounding Biggin Hill (“Orpington”; “West Wickham”). I joined groups like “Westerham and Biggin Hill News friends Community fun views gossip” and pored over hundreds of responses to posts like “Think I just saw Tom Cruise driving down jail lane that’s impossible.” The flashes of Cruise that winked from the replies were tantalizing — “I’ve seen him blue Ferrari…jail lane…”; “Lives up Cudham drives blue Ferrari” — but there was no way to tell who was reporting accurate details about the comings and goings of Tom Cruise, who was mistaken and who was merely lying for fun. The only way to find out was to do what Cruise himself would do: grab onto the nearest plane and go, for real.

Next to the Biggin Hill Airport, there is a pocket-size hotel built to serve the crews and engineers of the private planes that fly in and out. The hotel, its website boasts, offers “great views towards London” — something just about any place on Earth could offer with the right window arrangement, assuming it was not already in London. The description of the property’s sleek teal-and-toffee-colored restaurant turned out to be even more specifically accurate: The view of the runway at Biggin Hill Airport was without parallel. At the bar, I pulled up a leather stool and ordered (not in these exact words) the worst Shirley Temple of my life, which cost $11. My fellow patrons had long since familiarized themselves with the contours of the small dinner menu; they had been stranded at Biggin Hill for some time, because the private jet of the billionaire for whom they were working had received — you hate to hear this — an estimated $10 million worth of hail damage. I asked a maintenance technician if he thought Tom Cruise really did have a house in Biggin Hill. He replied with unflinching confidence: “I know he does.”

In the same venue, a man so young he might have been a teenager, who at one time worked inside the airport, revealed to me that Cruise had a parking spot there, though it was unclear if he meant for a car or a helicopter. Most of the good people of Biggin Hill, when grilled about Cruise’s living arrangements, seemed genuinely to have no idea what I was talking about. These were the two camps into which, without fail, every respondent fell: Either they had never so much as heard the rumor that Cruise walked among them, or they were 100 percent certain that he did.

Upon reaching Keston Park, the only gated community in the area matching The Sun’s description, I discovered two things: first, that there appeared to be an illegally locked gate obstructing public access to the footpath that cuts through the neighborhood — whether the gate is impenetrable is a matter of ongoing dispute among the Bromley borough council, myself and many other aspiring path-takers who have submitted complaints about the locked gate to the borough website — and, second, that the biggest movie star in the world did not live there. That was evident through holes that carpenter bees had bored into the barbed-wire-topped fences protecting Keston Park from the wider world. The stately houses faced one another too directly. Their trees could drop acorns into another’s gardens. There was nowhere to conveniently land a helicopter.

Oh, well. These were Keston Park’s problems — not mine and probably not Tom Cruise’s. Tom Cruise, as he and I both now knew, was most likely secretly living at another estate I had turned up in my research — one that was even closer to the airport.

The distance between any two points within the general environs of Biggin Hill is insignificant by car, which is probably why I was unable to persuade any taxi driver to transport me between them. It is less insignificant by foot, and even longer, though much more scenic, if one attempts to traverse it by way of the aforementioned footpaths. These meandering trails tended to be spectacularly beautiful, bursting with a vernal lushness that was nearly pornographic. House-high frozen fountains of eensy white hawthorn blossoms shaded dusty walkways. Wild roses as pink as Country Time lemonade exploded from leafy hedges. Fragile sapphire speedwells, fat purple clover tops and buttercups strewn like gold confetti — these were merely the things it was impossible not to step on. The fluorescent green of the meadows recalled the grasses of another royal province — Super Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom. Poppies and toadflax sprang out obscenely from stone walls. Tom Cruise would be crazy not to live here , I thought as I stroked the soft, sun-warmed mane of a little white donkey. Let’s all live here .

Except, upon my arrival at the end of an idyllic woodland stroll, I discovered that Cruise did not live there either. There was, in the front yard of this residence, a garden gnome lugging buckets on a yoke, which didn’t seem like Cruise’s style, and the gnome was overturned, lying on its side — definitely not his style. I righted the gnome and ambled on, in search of another public footpath that would, I hoped, lead me to where Cruise actually lived. Instead, I accidentally wandered into what (I learned through being yelled this information) was not a public right of way but a field privately owned by a woman who berated me until I ran into traffic on a nearby road.

That night, with half my allotted exploratory mission time used up, I lay awake in the hotel built for the flight attendants of billionaires’ jets, miserable and panicked at my failure to do anything but incur thousands of dollars in expenses for airfare and one Shirley Temple. Surely this wasn’t all for naught; surely some meaning could possibly be derived from an interaction between a movie star and a magazine journalist — even a brief one, even one in which the movie star had already said (through his publicist) he did not wish to participate, even one in which the star was not present, since some understanding of some dimension of his life could doubtless be gleaned through a study of his surroundings. But what if Cruise has been so successful in removing himself from our world that I would never find any trace of him? What if Cruise had evanesced into a high-octane mist of pure entertainment? Did I have time to just go to every single house in England and check if Cruise was home? How big was this nation? Why was the sun rising now, in the middle of the night? What time was it?! Had I accidentally not gone to sleep all night?

I had one more idea.

On my first day in town, I had stopped at a pub for lunch. I was told that there was a funeral going on and that there was an hour wait for food, but that if I ordered something simple like a sandwich, the wait would be less, so I ordered a sandwich, which actually took 90 minutes to arrive and was so, no offense, disgusting-tasting that I turned around and asked a middle-aged man sitting at the picnic table behind mine if he would like half a sandwich (no) and if it always took so long to receive a sandwich at this pub (unclear) and if it was true that Tom Cruise really lived nearby. “He’s here,” the man said to me.

“Do you know?” I asked. “Or are you guessing?”

“He’s definitely around here, that’s for sure,” he said. “I know where he is.”

At first, with the cagey pride of one who knows the favored hovering spot of an actual ghost, who acts as self-appointed doorman of the thin place between worlds, the man made a show of not telling me where. But then, on his way out, he materialized at my elbow and proffered three “clues” (his word).

“It’s within two miles of the airport,” he said. “Look for the biggest house. And I mean — ” his voice dropped to a whisper, “ — the biggest .”

“It’s a very famous house,” he said. “The anti-establishment of slavery started there.”

I was aware of this property from my earlier research. It was a colossal butter-colored manor once owned by a prime minister, William Pitt the Younger. I had eliminated it from contention as a possible Cruise residence because it was sold in 2018 (£8.5 million) to a used-car magnate who, at least judging by an article from 2020 that I read in Car Dealer magazine, appeared to be quite comfortably ensconced in it. But it was only a few miles away. On foot, the journey could be completed in just over an hour.

How, exactly, I ended up on the edge of that woman’s privately owned field again, I have no idea. The expedition to that point had seemed to take me through brand-new areas. All of a sudden, I noticed that the path had dissipated into dense forest. This is just like what happened yesterday, when I trespassed in that woman’s field, I thought, then looked up and spotted her house in the distance.

I panicked. I frightened a badger — likewise, babe! — and bolted through the forest as quickly as I could in a new, randomly chosen direction. This deposited me into a vast, previously unencountered field. On all previous paths, vigorously growing cow parsley had stood on slender stems, about shin high. Here, upright hordes of it grazed my shoulders, while fallen comrades entangled my ankles. Needles of true panic pricked my nape under sweaty hair. Statistically speaking, I assured myself, it was unlikely I would be trapped in this field so long that I would die there.

Although — wouldn’t it serve that woman right if I did die in this field, so close to her own, where I was not allowed? “That would teach her a lesson,” I said into the audio recorder I had brought in case I encountered Tom Cruise. Have to “find some way to notify her,” I explained. (Of my death.) Hopefully she would see my picture in a — newspaper! That would be another good thing about dying out here, I told the recorder. It would “serve” the editor who recklessly assigned me this article — who had irresponsibly approved my travel budget — “right.” It would probably ruin his life, or at least his work life. God, would he be fired? Certainly, at the very least, he would get in trouble. You should never have sent her to a small English town . Would our boss tell him not to blame himself? Hopefully not — I am dead because of him! I didn’t want to die, of course — but if it did happen, at least I would die doing what I loved: making people feel bad and be in trouble deservedly. I had yet to clearly develop a mental image of my widowed husband’s second wife when I realized that I had stumbled, midfield, upon a dirt path leading into a neighborhood. I ran down it — in, I was shocked to discover, the exact direction of the used-car dealer’s palatial estate.

The public footpath alongside the property — which, if a man drinking outside a pub at 2 p.m. is to be believed, is inhabited by Tom Cruise — looked like the aisle down which a fairy princess would glide at her wedding. Actually, no, even nicer: It was like the flower-strewn tunnel of light she would pass through following her death (from being viciously yelled at for walking in a private field BY ACCIDENT) on her journey to eternity. It wound beneath protective arches of graceful branches trailing heaps of white and pink blossoms. A gentle, constant wind rippled the flowers just enough to allow dappled sunlight to illuminate a trail through their lovely shade. So vast were the grounds, so lush the foliage, that the home itself was not visible from any vantage point. I listened for the distant throaty cry of a blue Ferrari, but heard only bird song.

The recorded owner of the estate made no response to my later attempts to contact him, to ask if, perchance, Tom Cruise (possibly in elaborate disguise) could be living in his house. Even if Cruise has no connection to the residence, this absolute lack of response serves to further obscure his existence. Not only is it impossible to determine where he lives — it isn’t even possible to determine where he does not live. The distance between Cruise and the average human remains unshrinkable. At a time when social media renders movie stars ever-present in the public field of vision — accessible to some extent through whatever scrupulously vetted personal information they share, but also broadly trackable via webs of celebrity-watching accounts that widely disseminate photos and rumors — Cruise has distinguished himself by becoming a comet. When, between protracted absences, his inscrutable orbit brings him back into Earth’s visible realm, he briefly commands the simultaneous attention of all its peoples: “Thank you to the people of Abu Dhabi,” read a June post on his Instagram account, alongside a photo of him greeting a crowd at a “Dead Reckoning Part One” premiere. (Also appreciated and acknowledged by their servant-sovereign for their attendance at other “Dead Reckoning Part One” premieres: “the people” of Rome; “everyone” in Seoul.)

At the conclusion of this promotional cycle, after Cruise has thanked everyone for allowing him to create world-class summer cinema, he will almost certainly disappear, not to be heard from again until next year, at which point his re-emergence will proclaim the arrival of “Dead Reckoning Part Two.” This vanishing, while perhaps rooted in avoidance of a press corps that asks questions he doesn’t want to answer, is massaged into something like a sacrificial duty to audiences. In disappearing the moment his work is through — always, like Santa Claus, with the promise of return — Cruise retains the mystique that so many Hollywood stars have lost this century. He goes away so that audiences may experience the thrill of his reappearance, and delight in the promise of movie magic he heralds.

Of course, it is possible that Tom Cruise does not even know that the gargantuan house in the quiet English village exists. But if we assume, perhaps foolishly, that he does live there, I did ascertain one new detail about his reality: He was in the process of having the long private driveway that weaves through the woods and stretches to the unseen manor beyond redone. It looks awesome.

Caity Weaver is a staff writer for the magazine. She last wrote about going on a package trip for youngish people.

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the plane from which Tom Cruise accepted an MTV Movie & TV Award. It was a fighter aircraft, not a fighter jet.

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Tom Cruise Has A Weirdly Cruel Way Of Keeping Pigeons From Interrupting Filming

• Tom Cruise creatively handles pigeon problem on set with birds of prey to ensure smooth filming of Mission: Impossible 8 in Trafalgar Square.
• Delays in Mission: Impossible 8 release announced due to SAG-AFTRA strike impact, pushing premiere from June 2024 to May 2025.
• Cruise's dedication to delivering high-stake stunts himself in the Mission: Impossible franchise sets it apart, making him a box office draw.

Tom Cruise is back on set as filming for Mission: Impossible 8 has commenced. Though it appears the crew was faced with an unusual problem, Cruise apparently had a creative solution albeit slightly cruel.

Tom Cruise Has A Strict Rule Regarding His Look During Public Events

Why tom cruise invited birds of prey to set.

Apparently, pigeons have been getting in the way of filming at London’s Trafalgar Square, where Cruise’s onscreen character Ethan Hunt must deal with a riot, and not the avian kind. Apparently, Cruise encouraged production to invite handlers with birds of prey to set to keep the pigeons at bay.

It was a clever move and meant the scenes were filmed without a hitch, a source told The Sun.

A variety of birds of prey, including hawks and falcons, have been used on set to combat the pigeon problem. And this certainly isn’t the first time large birds have been used to keep away smaller ones, in the entertainment industry and otherwise.

Though filming has just started on the new Mission: Impossible movie, it won’t release until next summer.

Why Toms New Mission: Impossible Movie Was Delayed

Though filming is underway, Mission: Impossible 8 was already delayed, with the news disappointing fans last October. Paramount Pictures pushed back the release of the film by almost a full year. Originally slated for June 28, 2024, the film's premiere was rescheduled to May 23, 2025.

The delay came as a result of the SAG-AFTRA strike, which caused production on many shows and films to halt. Cruise's involvement in the Mission: Impossible movies has been nothing short of iconic, making it one of the most successful and well-known action movie franchises globally.

As the face of the series, Cruise has played the role of IMF agent Ethan Hunt since its inception. His dedication to performing jaw-dropping stunts himself has become a trademark of the franchise, setting it apart in the action genre.

'Mission Impossible': The Cast Ranked From Richest To Poorest

Since its debut in 1996 with the simply titled Mission: Impossible, the franchise has grossed over $3.5 billion globally , making it one of the highest-grossing film series of all time.

With a net worth of at least $600 million , Cruise makes a substantial pay check for each film, reportedly commanding around $70-100 million per movie , showcasing his value as a box office draw.

While Cruise will clearly be busy overseas for the next few months as he completes the movie, there continue to be rumors around his personal life, as his youngest daughter, Suri, is turning 18. Reports claim the actor hopes to make contact with the teen now that she’s a legal adult, though there have rumblings that Suri and her mother Katie Holmes aren’t interested in communicating.

There have also been rumors about Tom’s connection to Scientology. While it was speculated last year he may be distancing himself from the Church, his appearance at Scientology HQs in London in November seemed to dispel the rumors.

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Tom Cruise Creates His Own ‘Trafalgar Square’ Tube Station Filming Mission: Impossible in London

The actor was pictured filming scenes for the eighth 'Mission: Impossible' movie in the British capital on April 28

Raw Image / Goff / Splash / SplashNews

Tom Cruise has taken over the streets of London!

On Sunday, April 28, the actor, 61, was photographed filming scenes for the next Mission: Impossible movie in the British capital outside an invented Tube station called 'Trafalgar Square.'

Cruise shut down the real Trafalgar Square for the shoot as he was seen coming in and out of the London Underground station while surrounded by crowds of extras.

Off camera, the action star appeared in happier spirits as he chatted to members of the crew in between takes. 

The eighth installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise is set for a May 23, 2025 release. According to Deadline , the release was delayed by a year due to the SAG-AFTRA strike , which ended in November 2023.

Cruise returns to the franchise as protagonist Ethan Hunt, along with director and longtime collaborative partner Christopher McQuarrie. 

The actor was spotted filming more adrenaline-fueled scenes for the action movie in London last month. 

On March 24, the American Made star was photographed sprinting down a street in the capital wearing a black suit with an unbuttoned white shirt covered in fake blood.

Last summer, Cruise returned to the big screen in the seventh film in the franchise, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning .

The film made $172 million at the domestic box office and earned the franchise its first Oscars nominations for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound at the 96th Academy Awards earlier this year.

Never miss a story — sign up for  PEOPLE's free daily newsletter  to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Meanwhile, Cruise is reportedly set to appear in another sequel of his movies for the third Top Gun film , following the huge success of the second installment, Top Gun: Maverick , released in 2022. 

In January, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Paramount is developing the sequel with co-writer Ehren Kruger, with Joe Kosinski set to direct. According to the outlet, the film will see Cruise return in his role as Pete Mitchell, alongside his Maverick costars Glen Powell and Miles Teller .

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'Mission: Impossible 8': Release Date, Cast, Filming, and Everything We Know So Far

Ethan Hunt's next mission is currently on hold.

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Does 'mission: impossible 8' have a release date, will 'mission: impossible 8' be in theaters, who is returning for 'mission: impossible 8', who are the new cast members in 'mission: impossible 8', what will 'mission: impossible 8' be about, who is making 'mission: impossible 8', when and where did 'mission: impossible 8' film.

Editor's Note: The following contains full spoilers for 'Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning' Fans of the Mission: Impossible franchise have been eagerly awaiting the next chapter in Ethan Hunt's story in Mission: Impossible 8 .

It's honestly amazing that the Mission: Impossible series has been able to up the ante with every installment since the original 1996 film. Each installment somehow ends up being more exciting than the last and adds its own flavor of action spectacle to keep the franchise fresh and exciting. With a solid foundation formed by Mission: Impossible 1996, we got high-speed motorcycle chases in Mission: Impossible II , a terrifying villain in Mission: Impossible III , a Burj Khalifa-scaling triumph in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol , a stealthy espionage treat in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation , and a gripping nuclear prevention tale in Mission: Impossible - Fallout .

Ethan Hunt's latest mission, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning , might be the best installment in the long-running series yet. In a surprisingly topical tale about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, Ethan and his team are tasked with finding and destroying a rogue AI known only as The Entity. The resulting globe-trotting journey leads to some incredible action setpieces and more than a few shocking twists and turns.

While the second half of the epic search for The Entity undoubtedly makes Mission: Impossible 8 one of the most anticipated projects of 2025, although moviegoers will have to wait a bit longer than expected for Ethan Hunt's next mission. To learn more about the second part's cast, release date, production status, and more, here is everything we know so far about Mission: Impossible 8 (queue fuse-lighting sequence).

Editor's Note: This piece was updated on April 24, 2024.

Mission: Impossible 8

Mission: Impossible 8 is set to release on Friday, May 25, 2025 . The film has gone through numerous delays, having previously been scheduled for release on August 5, 2022, November 4, 2022, July 7, 2023, and June 28, 2024.

While the initial two delays were because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused both Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning to constantly be delayed as well, the latest setback was because filming had been halted by the SAG-AFTRA strike .

There's a reason why Tom Cruise's catchphrase of "See you at the movies" has become so prevalent. With Top Gun: Maverick and the Mission: Impossible franchise being such massive box office hits, you better believe that Mission: Impossible 8 will be premiering exclusively in a movie theater near you. After the previous movie lost its IMAX screens after one week due to Oppenheimer , Mission: Impossible 8 will be receiving a three-week IMAX exclusive releas e.

After the film's theatrical run concludes, Mission: Impossible 8 will more than likely be joining the rest of the franchise entries on Paramount+ for a streaming release.

If, by chance, you still haven't seen Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning , you can stream the movie on Paramount+.

Watch on Paramount+

Unsurprisingly, global action superstar Tom Cruise will once again be reprising his role as IMF Agent Ethan Hunt. The actor's world-famous tenacity for doing his own stunts has made him one of modern cinema's most famous figures. Also set to return to assist Ethan in his quest for The Entity are Captain America: The First Avenger standout Hayley Atwell as Grace, Hot Fuzz star Simon Pegg as Benji, and Pulp Fiction icon Ving Rhames as Luther. Also on the cast list is Doctor Sleep star Rebecca Ferguson as the fan favorite Ilsa Faust, but given how her character's story goes in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning , that may not be the case (unless there is a flashback sequence or Ilsa's death was a fakeout).

Other characters expected to return are the antagonists of the film, such as Essai Morales ( La Bamba ) as Gabriel, Vanessa Kirby ( Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw ) as The White Queen, and Pom Klementieff ( Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 ) as Paris , the latter of whom may return as a redeemed ally after barely surviving her wounds in Part 1 . Also likely returning are Part 1 's deuteragonists, including Shea Whigham 's ( Kong: Skull Island ) CIA agent Jasper Briggs, Greg Tarzan Davis ( Top Gun: Maverick ) as CIA agent Degas, Charles Parnell ( Top Gun: Maverick ) as NRO, and Henry Czerny ( Clear and Present Danger ), reprising the character of Kittridge, who debuted all the way back in the first Mission: Impossible . Kittridge isn't the only familiar face from a past film returning this time either, as Rolf Saxon ( Tomorrow Never Dies ) is reprising his role as William Donloe - another character who hasn't been seen since the first film. Also likely returning in flashbacks is Mariela Garriga ( NCIS ) as Marie - the mysterious woman from Ethan's past who Gabriel killed.

The returning cast is already massive, but even more new faces are joining the second chapter. This includes Emmy Award-Winner Nick Offerman ( The Last of Us ) as Sydney, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Holt McCallany (Mindhunter) as Bernstein, the Secretary of Defense. Also joining the cast in undisclosed roles are Emmy-Award Winner Hannah Waddingham ( Ted Lasso ), Academy Award nominee Janet McTeer ( The Menu ), Lucy Tulugarjuk , Katy O'Brian ( Love Lies Bleeding ), and Tramell Tillman ( Severance ).

While an official plot synopsis has not yet been released, Mission: Impossible 8 will almost certainly be continuing Ethan Hunt's search for The Entity, even though the world's governments and other third parties are trying to stop him. Ethan is also likely seeking retribution against Gabriel, who has now murdered two people very close to him. It's an epic conclusion that will likely see Ethan bring along old friends and potentially meet new enemies.

The film was initially set to be titled Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two , but this is now subject to change. Only time will tell if Paramount decides to remove the "Part One" from the seventh installment.

Much of the behind-the-camera crew from Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning will be returning for Mission: Impossible 8 . This includes writer/director Christopher McQuarrie , who has become a franchise veteran after directing Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation and Mission: Impossible - Fallout prior to the Dead Reckoning films. McQuarrie also shares screenwriting credit with Band of Brothers scribe Erik Jendresen .

Also attached to return are composer Lorne Balfe ( Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves ), cinematographer Fraser Taggart ( Robot Overlords ), editor Eddie Hamilton ( Top Gun: Maverick ), and production designer Gary Freeman ( The Witches ).

In an interview with Collider, McQuarrie revealed that most of Part 2 has already been completed , but there are still some major set pieces that have not been filmed yet. However, production was not able to be completed before the initiation of the SAG-AFTRA strike. Filming has since picked back up, and photos from the set made their way online in late March 2024 .