Has Tom Cruise’s student become the master? Close, but not quite.
Cruise is still going strong at 62 years old (nearly the same age as Jack Lemmon when he made Grumpy Old Men) with multiple projects in production, including Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s next film, a rumored Top Gun 3 and Edge of Tomorrow 2, the movie where he goes to space, and, of course, Mission: Impossible 8. The retitled sequel to 2023’s thrilling Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One started filming in 2022 before production shut down due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. Cameras resumed rolling earlier this year, and Cruise is once again risking his life for our entertainment. Bless him.
Here’s everything we know about Mission: Impossible 8, including plot details, the cast, and release date.
Plot
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One ended with AI threatening to take over the world (couldn’t relate) and Ethan Hunt and friends needing to find a submarine. Mission: Impossible 8 will presumably take place shortly after the events of that film, but director and co-writer (and Taylor Swift fan) Christopher McQuarrie has mostly kept quiet about specific plot details. He did, however, reveal that they filmed in South Africa and the Arctic. “Tom and I are always trying to get the big sh*t out of the way first,” he told Empire. “South Africa was intense. The aerial sequence is… It’s just outrageous.”
To quote an I Think You Should Leave legend, gimme dat.
Mission: Impossible 8 will also have an underwater sequence that fixes a pet peeve of Cruise’s. “Tom and I are constantly reevaluating our own work and asking ourselves how we could have done it better. We’ve done underwater sequences previously. We’ve worked underwater in Edge of Tomorrow, and we worked underwater in Rogue Nation, and we left very dissatisfied with those sequences,” McQuarrie told Collider. “And we analyze why we were dissatisfied. What were all the factors working against us? The biggest being, not having real knowledge in that area.” Now they do.
As for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning was split into two films (even if Mission: Impossible 8 lost the “Dead Reckoning” subtitle), McQuarrie explained, “I knew I wanted to expand the cast, and I knew I wanted to give each one of those characters more to do, so I knew the movie was going to be bigger and longer than [Mission: Impossible – Fallout]. And at which point I said, ‘Why are we fighting this? Why are we going to try to jam this into two hours? Let’s just break it in half and make it two movies.’ That really was the rationale behind it being a two-part movie. It just it wasn’t just that the story was bigger but that we wanted more emotion in the movie.”
Cast
Tom Cruise will be back for Mission: Impossible 8, obviously. Other confirmed cast members include Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Hayley Atwell, Shea Whigham, Pom Klementieff, and Frederick Schmidt. Could Rebecca Ferguson return as well, despite what happened to Ilsa Faust in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One?
“To speak very clearly — because I know a lot of people are sad about it, I’m sad about it — I had filmed three films. My deal was done. And I love her beyond words. Beyond words. I think she’s the most awesome, fantastic character,” the Silo actress said on the UnWrapped podcast. “Selfishly, that’s a lot of time to make a Mission film. And unless you’re going to have a lot of screen time, that’s a lot of time sitting around waiting to film a huge movie that could take over a year to film. It’s dedication.” That sounds like a no.
At least we’ll always have the opera scene.
Release Date
Mission: Impossible 8 is scheduled for release on May 23, 2025.
Trailer
No trailer.
But I have something more important to discuss: what’s your favorite Tom Cruise stunt in the Mission: Impossible movies? Is it the vault scene in the original, or the time he rode a motorcycle off a cliff? I’m partial to the Burj Khalifa sequence in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Cruise really initiated the death-defying version of ghost protocol with this one.
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