The movies are back. Tom Cruise will run, fight, and put his life at unnecessary risk to perform impressive feats of old Hollywood stardom in Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning, according to a new teaser trailer for the 2025 blockbuster.
Arriving two years after the elegantly titled Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the eighth film in the espionage franchise will pick up where that movie left off in Ethan Hunt and co.’s fight against a rogue AI threatening geopolitical stability and world peace from a lost Russian submarine somewhere in the Arctic. Multiple characters including Henry Czerny as Eugene Kittridge, the IMF director who memorably antagonized Hunt in the original 1996 movie, narrate the new trailer to set up the stakes and quickly summarize decades of Tom Cruise’s hero always narrowly saving the day at ever-increasing levels of international risk.
The trailer shows Hunt’s hacker accomplices Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) back at his side along with new recruit Grace (Hayley Atwell), who was first introduced in Dead Reckoning as a thief who later turned IMF agent. With both pieces of the key to the submarine housing the rogue AI, the crew attempt to get onboard and disable the all-predicting, ephemeral nemesis while everyone and everything that could possible get in their way seems to do exactly that.
Unlike its predecessor, Final Reckoning wasn’t filmed during the pandemic and will hopefully showcase more of the franchise’s charismatic ensemble cast actually acting together at the same locations and sets. Mission Impossible 8 also clearly carries on Cruise’s recent penchant for spectacular stunts. The new trailer shows him hanging off the side of a small airplane shortly after takeoff as he fights with the pilot inside.
And while the title and trailer certainly make it seem like this could be Ethan Hunt’s last rodeo, Cruise himself doesn’t seem to have any plans of stepping away from the character in the near-future. The 61-year old cinephile and life-long A-lister said last year that he might go the Indiana Jones route. “Harrison Ford is a legend; I hope to be still going; I’ve got 20 years to catch up with him,” Cruise said amid last summer’s Barbenheimer-mania. “I hope to keep making Mission: Impossible films until I’m his age.”
