Tom Cruise Hangs On For Dear Life in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” Trailer
The official trailer for Tom Cruise’s potential last mission as IMF Agent Ethan Hunt has arrived, giving us a fresh look at the lengths Cruise has been willing to go to keep this action franchise at the extreme edge of what’s possible to do on camera. The new look at Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning takes us on a brief trip down memory lane, to Cruise’s very first mission as Ethan Hunt, when he pulled off the incredible break-in at the CIA’s Black Vault, as well as looks at Hunt’s involvement in a series of high-profile, top-secret missions, from Moscow (during a bombing at the Kremlin intended to kill him) to the time he gassed a security briefing. All of this is being explained to Nick Offerman’s military man, with Hunt now in custody, and in cuffs.
“If we want to bring the world back from the brink, we have to deal with him,” it’s reasoned. So, Ethan will have one more mission that, should he chose to accept it, could be his last and most dangerous.
Cruise is now 62 years old (not that he looks it), and this will be his eighth mission. The trailer includes a glimpse of him hanging off a plane, upside down, and, at one point,one-handedd. Cruise’s first assignment as Ethan Hunt was way back in 1996’s Mission: Impossible (where he pulled off that break-in at the CIA black site), and has since become arguably the greatest showcase for practical stunts in the history of cinema. Cruise and Co. have been teasing each installment’s defining stunt for nearly a decade at this point, from Cruise hanging off the side of an Airbus A400m in Rogue Nation to his record-breaking HALO skydive and his mastery of helicopter piloting in Fallout.
Cruise, director Christopher McQuarrie, and longtime stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood have cooked up another menu of maniac stunts for The Final Reckoning, which they retooled after the last installment, Dead Reckoning, wasn’t quite the box office blockbuster they expected (it lost out on Imax theater space to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer).
Cruise is joined by longtime IMF partners Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell and Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn, his two closest compatriots. The cast also includes Hayley Atwell as Grace, Esai Morales as the bad guy Gabriel, Henry Czerny as Eugene Kittridge, Pom Klementieff as Paris, Vanessa Kirby as the White Widow, and Hannah Waddingham, Katy O’Brian, and Tramell Tillman.
Dead Reckoning left us with a very dramatic cliffhanger, with Ethan and his team doing battle against The Entity, a rogue AI that is threatening global security. The key to the AI was a literal key, one that could control or destroy the Entity, which Ethan and his team finally secured by the end of the film. Yet, Dead Reckoning ended with a reveal of a sunken submarine loaded with secrets, the AI’s original resting place, teasing audiences that Ethan’s fight to control the Entity and secure the planet was only just the beginning.
Check out the trailer below. Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning will premiere on May 23, 2025.
Featured image: Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
