After restoring old-school blockbuster energy last year with Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise, the new mayor of Hollywood, is back with another installment in the excellent and near flawless Mission: Impossible franchise. Technically the seventh film in the series, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, joins a few other summer releases as the first half of a two-part tale. However, unlike Across the Spider-Verse and Fast X, Mission is probably the least cliffhanger-y of them all (although the climactic setpiece does involve Cruise literally hanging off a train). Despite its definitive ending, there’s quite a bit left for Dead Reckoning Part Two to explore.
The end of Part One leaves Ethan Hunt (Cruise) on the run from the villainous Gabriel (Esai Morales) as the two pursue control of the artificial intelligence known as “The Entity,” whose predictive abilities are believed by the world’s intelligence community to have the power to shape the future. Hunt, having once again gone rogue, will also have to fend off IMF head honcho Eugene Kittridge (Henry Cznery) and his stooges Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis). And then there’s the new character Dead Reckoning brings into the fold, Grace (Hayley Atwell). Part One leaves her with an important decision to make, as she weighs committing her life to the IMF, going from master thief to master spy.
So what’s next? Part Two is still in production—writer/director Christopher McQuarrie recently stated that the bulk of filming is complete, save for the “biggest set piece, the central set piece of the film, which is massive and unlike anything we’ve done, and, I think, unlike anything you’ve seen.” That’s separate from an “outrageous” aerial sequence set in South Africa, which Cruise teased last year in a series of videos, and a sequence set in the Arctic, where we know Ethan is headed eventually to discover the submarine housing the Entity as teased by Part One’s ending. Filming stopped for the press tour of Part One and will pick back up later in the summer (assuming it’s not delayed by the ongoing writers’ strike or actors’ strike).
Much has been made of Part One’s allusions to the very first Mission film De Palma directed back in 1996, chief among them bringing Kittridge back. It looks like McQuarrie is going to double down on that full circle sentiment with Rolf Saxon set to return in Part 2. Saxon played CIA analyst William Donloe, the mark in Ethan’s CIA heist from the first film, still considered the series’ defining moment. The photo McQuarrie posted on Instagram features Donloe bundled up—diehard fans will recall Kittredge banished Donloe to an Alaskan outpost for letting Ethan get the drop on him, and we know Ethan is headed to the Arctic so it seems like a reunion is imminent.
There are some equally exciting new cast additions for Part Two as well. Beloved chracter actors Holt McCallany (Mindhunter) and Nick Offerman will play members of the intelligence community opposite Czerny. Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham is also in the mix, seen here on the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier, where a handful of filming took place in December 2022.
As of now, the plan is still for Part Two, the eight film in the franchise, to be Ethan Hunt’s final mission. So expect McQuarrie and Cruise to pepper in other nods to the series’ history—an encore for Ethan’s ex-wife or once-franchise successor Jeremy Renner, perhaps?—and most importantly, for them to go above and beyond to outdo themselves in the stunt department, as if jumping off a cliff wasn’t already enough.