Tom Cruise’s global game of promotional hopscotch planted him in Cannes this week, where he will unveil “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” following stops in Japan, Korea and London. Brooding closeups of the star’s dirt-and-blood caked face have peppered the Croisette on 4K LED screens and the premiere promises to be one this year’s glitziest.
While Denzel Washington, Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Mescal and Halle Berry will all take turns on the red carpet at the Grand Palais, Cruise is the one pulling out all the stops for his last go as field agent Ethan Hunt.
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At 62, the movie icon is dancing harder and faster than ever before to get global audiences to theaters. Last week, he scaled the top of the massive BFI Imax theater in London. The following day, he jumped feet-first out of a helicopter with a camera strapped to his chest. Perhaps most daunting for a celebrity of his caliber, he sat for an interview with TikTok on Tuesday.
Why? Because the stakes for “Final Reckoning” are high on multiple fronts. First and foremost is the legacy on the line for Cruise. Yes, he’s a four-time Oscar nominee and the titular maverick of “Top Gun.” He’ll return to the artier fare soon with an Alejandro González Iñarritu collaboration, one that will perhaps burnish him with the prestige luster he earned for his memorable turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” in 1999. But “Mission: Impossible” is Cruise’s baby. It’s the franchise he’s banged up and bled his body for in relentless stunt competition with himself, across eight installments. The first film in the series was the first one he produced and the death-defying stunts he performs in each installment have become synonymous with his brand
“He’s done a social media campaign like I’ve never seen,” said senior Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “But it’s worth it, this movie is the cinematic equivalent of the biggest ride at the theme park.”
Cruise and the machinery around him have come to acknowledge “Mission: Impossible” as representing the moviegoing experience itself. The actor has been especially keen this time around on selling the film as an event best enjoyed on premium formats like Imax (smart, considering how curious and receptive general audiences have been about varying screen configurations since Ryan Coogler explained it plainly for his box office hit “Sinners”). These movies are so hallowed for Cruise that in 2020, while filming “Dead Reckoning,” he went apeshit in a now-infamous rant when two crew members were standing closer than six feet apart, violating the era’s health protocols and which may have led to a production shutdown.
But if we’re talking about cementing Cruise as one of the greatest movie stars of all time, the financial performance of “Final Reckoning” must also overwhelm. The film’s predecessor, “Dead Reckoning,” opened below projections in 2023, after costing close to $300 million before the studio’s $100 million-plus marketing spend. It grossed just over $570 million worldwide. While domestic numbers weren’t mind-blowing, an individual familiar with the project said “Dead Reckoning” is the top-performing “Mission: Impossible” film in the series at the international box office (minus China, where it had a lackluster run along with several other U.S. titles that year).
The budget for “Final Reckoning” is nearing mythical levels, varying from the high $300 million range to over $400 million, according to reports. That puts it up there with a “Fast & Furious” or “Avengers” film. In 2020, the narrative coming out production was that both “Dead Reckoning” and “Final Reckoning” were being filmed concurrently.
The truth is, according to one studio insider, they were filmed consecutively. Paramount sources said “Final Reckoning” is on track to best its seven previous outings. The film must not only earn cash but also earn Cruise the perfect landing to nearly 45 years of packing the cineplex.
A successful Cannes launch could give the series and its star the sendoff it needs.
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