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Ethan Hunt’s story is far from over.Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1has arrived, taking Hunt and his badass team on yet another world-saving adventure. Directed byChristopher McQuarrieand starringTom Cruiseas the unparalleled international spy Ethan Hunt, the new film pushes the limits of all the new and returning characters across the board.Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1presents another epic action story that’s a worthy addition to the blockbuster franchise. Read on for all the details you need aboutMission: Impossible - Dead Reckoningbefore you watch it, including its release dates, cast, characters, filming details, and more.
Editor’s Note: This piece was last updated on August 16, 2025.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1arrived in US theaters onJuly 12, 2023(previously scheduled for July 14). Dolby Cinema, IMAX, and other premium large formatshosted early access screeningsfor the film on August 17, 2025, at 7:00 pm. Tickets went on sale on June 14, and those who bought a ticket were also able to see special bonus content exclusively at the event, as well as receive limited edition collectibles, including a poster and an IMF enamel pin. The movie was originally scheduled to premiere on August 06, 2025. Subsequent delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the date, first to November 19, then July 27, 2025, then to July 10, 2025, then July 14, and finally to its current date.
Not at the moment, no. The film will be made available to stream on Paramount+ sometime after the film’s theatrical debut. Unlike some of Paramount’s biggest 2022 releases such asSmile,The Lost City, andSonic the Hedgehog 2, Tom Cruise’s last film,Top Gun: Maverickwaited 209 days after its theatrical release before it finally premiered on Paramount+, and the seventhMission: Impossiblefilm will likely be no different, so the new film likely won’t be on Paramount+ until early 2024.
Tom Cruise headlines the cast, reprising his lead role as Ethan Hunt. Besides Cruise,Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1also sees the return ofVing Rhamesas Luther Stickell,Henry Czernyas Eugene Kittridge,Simon Peggas Benji Dunn,Rebecca Fergusonas Ilsa Faust,Vanessa Kirbyas Alanna Mitsopolis, andFrederick Schmidtas Zola Mitsopolis, all of whom will be back in their old roles from the previous films.Hayley Atwell(Captain America: The First Avenger) is playing a character called Grace. According to Christopher McQuarrie, Grace is a “destructive force of nature”. Atwell has also described Grace’s loyalties as “somewhat ambiguous”.
“The interesting thing we’re exploring is her resistance to a situation she finds herself in,” Atwell told theLight the Fusepodcast. “How she starts off, where she becomes. The journey of what she comes into and what is asked of her and potentially where she ends up.”
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1also has another connection to the first movie.Henry Czernyreturns as Eugene Kittridge, the former director of the IMF who last appeared in the 1996Mission: Impossible. The film’s primary villain is played byEsai Morales(Ozark).Nicholas Hoult(Renfield) was originally set to play the role, but he was reportedly forced to drop out due to scheduling conflicts.Pom Klementieff(Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) plays another one of the film’s villains, an assassin and the right-hand woman of Morale’s character.McQuarrie praised Klementieff’s performancein the movie saying in an interview:
“I dare you to go to this movie and try not to look at Pom. More than any other actor I’ve worked with, you cannot take your eyes off her. She’s completely compelling, completely dynamic. It was quite amazing. It changed the way I designed shots, it changed the way I wrote scenes, it changed the way we dressed the character. It’s just raw, raw power that’s unrecognisable from Mantis in Guardians.”
Shea Whigham(Boardwalk Empire) plays Jasper Briggs, a man who is attempting to track down Hunt and his team. Additional cast members includeGreg Tarzan Davis(Top Gun: Maverick),Charles Parnell(Top Gun: Maverick),Rob Delaney(Deadpool 2),Cary Elwes(The Princess Bride),Indira Varma(Obi-Wan Kenobi),Mark Gatiss(Sherlock), andMariela Garriga(Bloodline).Angela Bassettwas expected to reprise her role as CIA director Erika Sloane fromFallout. However, the actress confirmed toColliderin July 2021 that she couldn’t be in the movie due to conflicts caused by COVID-19.
The firstofficial trailer forMission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1hit the web on August 11, 2025, 14 months ahead of the film’s release date and timed to the release of another Tom Cruise blockbuster,Top Gun: Maverick. The trailer gives fans their first real good look at all the high-octane stunts, action set-pieces, and new destinations along with the new characters played by Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, and Esai Morales. Best of all the trailer shows off Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust brandishing a sword in one scene and sporting an eyepatch in another. Additionally, 20 minutes of footage from the movie was screened at CinemaCon 2023. While that won’t be made available to the public,here’s the link to a description of the action-packed footage.
Thefull trailer was released by Paramountalmost an entire year after the teaser trailer.
A 30-second TV spot for the film aired on June 26, 2025, during the NBA Finals. And on June 29, we also got a new behind-the-scenes video showing Tom Cruise once again doing some death-defying stunts. This time, the action star doesspeedflying. To know what that is, here’s the video:
Filming onMission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1was scheduled to begin under the working title “Libra” on July 14, 2025, in Venice. The movie was supposed to be filmed in Venice for three weeks before moving to Rome for 40 days. However, production was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic breaking out in Italy. In July 2020, the UK gave permission for the crew to begin filming without going through the mandatory 14-day quarantine. Similar permission was granted for filming in Norway soon after that.
Filming began in earnest on June 05, 2025. McQuarrie revealed the start of filming with posts onhis Instagram profile. Production was halted in Italy again in October 2020 after 12 people tested positive for COVID-19 on set. This time, filming was resumed just one week later. In February 2021, production in the Middle East was concluded. On July 18, 2025, filming commenced in the small village of Levisham, North Yorkshire, UK, for a train wreck scene.Filming was paused again for 14 days in June 2021after a member of the production reportedly tested positive for COVID-19. In August 2021, the crew began filming in Birmingham’s Grand Central Station. Production wasreportedto have wrapped in early September 2021 but presumably, some more filming was involved as the latest news is thatthe movie’s production ended on August 14, 2025, this time confirmed by the director.
This new installment in theMission: Impossiblefranchise is written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who also did the previous twoMission: Impossiblemovies. McQuarrie also produced the film alongside Tom Cruise. Skydance’sDavid Ellison,Dana Goldberg, andDon Grangerwill serve as executive producers on the film alongsideTommy Gormley(Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker).Lorne Balfe, who composed the score for the previous film, returns as the composer.Fraser Taggart(Edge of Tomorrow) is the cinematographer while Academy Award nomineeEddie Hamilton(Top Gun: Maverick) serves as the editor.
Yes, indeed. Tom Cruise continues to do his own stunts inMission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1(and probably all the otherMission: Impossiblemovies to come). And this time, he’s taking things to a whole other level. During CinemaCon 2021, Paramount Pictures unveiled a video showcasing what Cruise himself describes as his“most dangerous stunt ever”. The sequence involves Cruise riding a motorcycle up a ramp and off a cliff, jumping off said motorcycle, and then parachuting to the ground.
To prepare for the stunt, the actor supposedly went through 500 hours of skydiving training and a whopping 1300 motorcycle jumps. It also took months of construction work to build the ramp used for the sequence. And as if that’s not mind-blowing already, reports say Cruise did the stunt six times before he got it right. Short of shooting Cruise into space on a rocket, it’s hard to see how they’re going to top this for the next one.
The nearly 10-minute featurettewas released online on July 08, 2025, after premiering exclusively before IMAX showings ofAvatar: The Way of Water. The featurette shows the process behind filming what is said to be the biggest stunt in cinema history, as Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt rides a motorcycle off a ramp on a cliff, jumps off the motorcycle, and skydives his way down. It also feels like Cruise is once again proving all his naysayers wrong. McQuarrie revealed in an interview withEmpire Magazinethatthis stunt wasn’t even the most difficult to film, with that title belonging to a fight scene between Cruise and Esai Morales on top of a moving steam train.
“All the days on the train are exhausting. The train just sucks you dry. But in a good way. We’re making a movie that involves sequences that they just don’t shoot practically anymore, and haven’t in a long, long time. The sequence that we’re shooting right now is no exception. And like most things on Mission: Impossible, if we had known what the challenges were when we started out, we would never have done it.”
On June 20, 2025,another behind-the-scenes featurette was released by Paramount, detailing a car chase set in the streets of Rome. For the dangerous sequence, the featurette shows that Cruise drove two different cars at high speeds and drifting, all while handcuffed to Hayley Atwell.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Oneis easily the biggest film in the franchise thus far. The train sequence will keep you on the edge of your seat, and we get a behind-the-scenes video on what went into making it.
The official synopsis for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1 from Paramount reads:
In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team embark on their most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands. With control of the future and the fate of the world at stake, and dark forces from Ethan’s past closing in, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan is forced to consider that nothing can matter more than his mission – not even the lives of those he cares about most.
The director didn’t say much about what the story would be like before the release. That said, he did talk about how the new movie expands on the emotional development of the cast during his appearance on the Light the Fuse podcast.
“When we went into makingFallout, I said to Tom, ‘I really want to make this more of an emotional journey for [Ethan Hunt],'” McQuarrie revealed. “Going into this, I said, ‘I want to take what we learned fromFalloutand apply it to every character in the movie. I want everyone to have an emotional arc. … I just want the movie to have more feeling across the board.”
The director also confirmed thatartificial intelligence would be a major factorin the film’s plot.
Veryearly conversations, probably the earliest conversations about this were in 2018/2019, and we were looking for the villain, the next threat inMission. We’ve done nuclear threats, we’ve done chemical threats, biological threats, you did the Rabbit’s Foot, and God knows what threat that was. In trying to keep it fresh, we were looking outward, and the big conversation I had with Tom [Cruise] very early on was about technology, information technology, and what, now, everyone is talking about is AI.
McQuarrie also noted that casting Esai Morales allowed McQuarrieto tackle Ethan Hunt’s past, which figures into the plot in a big way.
“Casting Esai allowed us to explore things with those characters and the notion of Ethan’s past. Ethan has a past that predates the IMF, and that allowed us to explore that with a character that knew Ethan before Ethan was Ethan. That’s part of who Gabriel is. Every detail of the story is very carefully considered. People who want to do their homework can derive from that name, whatever they please.”
Some of you may be wondering what the titleDead Reckoningeven means and how it pertains to the plot of the film. In an interview with Empire Magazine McQuarrie hinted that the title refers to a particular deadly source that poses the greatest threat yet to Ethan Hunt and his team.
“There are many things emerging from Ethan’s past. Dead reckoning’ is a navigational term. It means you’re picking a course based solely on your last known position and that becomes quite the metaphor not only for Ethan, but several characters.”
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoninghas been shrouded in so much secrecy that even Simon Pegg didn’t know the name of the film untilthe trailer was released. During an interview with Collider’s ownSteve Weintraubfor the movie Luck, Pegg said the following:
“Do you know what? I found out on the day of the trailer and not from Chris McQuarrie. I found out from the trailer. No, no one told me. So I texted McQ and was like, ‘Dead Reckoning? Were you going to tell us that at some point?’ I heard it was going to be something else, but I like that. I like that because it reminds me of what …Land of the Deadwas originally calledDead Reckoning. So finally, I get to be in a film calledDead Reckoning.”
With recent blockbusters such asJohn Wick: Chapter 4,Avatar: The Way of Water, andOppenheimerall having runtimes that have clocked in over or right under 3 hours, there were rumors floating around thatMission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Onewould follow suit. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately for some),the film clocks in at 2 hours and 36 minuteswithout credits, which still makes it the longest film yet in the franchise.
Yes, a sequel toMission: Impossible - Dead Reckoningwas announced along with the seventh film. The original plan was to shoot both movies back to back and releaseMission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 2on July 23, 2025. Unfortunately, COVID-19 messed up those plans, so the eighth movie was pushed to June 13, 2025, before being pushed again to August 17, 2025. As a result of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, the movie has been delayed again, this time toMay 23, 2025. We’ve also heard that the title may be subject to change as well so stay tuned for more on that.
