Skip to main content

Mission: Impossible 7 and more lead Paramount’s film slate

When it comes to movies, Paramount is betting big on Tom Cruise. At CinemaCon, Cruise was at the center of no less than three of Paramount’s upcoming films: Top Gun: Maverick, and Mission: Impossible 7 and 8. Via The Hollywood Reporter, Cruise appeared in a video message for the CinemaCon crowd that featured the actor flying an antique plane somewhere in South Africa while performing a stunt for the next Mission: Impossible film. Cruise thanked the attendees for their support, and they were subsequently treated to the first screening of Top Gun: Maverick prior to its nationwide rollout on May 28.

As for Cruise’s other major franchise, the new names for the sequels were announced as Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One and Part Two. Plot details for the sequels are still under wraps, but they could prove to be the final installments in the series. Dead Reckoning Part One will arrive in theaters on July 14, 2023, while Part Two will premiere on June 28. 2024.

The cast of Mission: Impossible - Fallout.
Paramount

The other big news out of Paramount’s presentation is that the spinoff from A Quiet Place now has a proper name. It’s called A Quiet Place: Day One, and as the name implies, it will take place on the day that the noise-sensitive aliens invaded Earth. Pig director Michael Sarnoski will helm the spinoff, while John Krasinski is still developing A Quiet Place Part III as a separate movie.

Recommended Videos

Paramount also showed off the first footage from director Damien Chazelle’s latest film Babylon. Brad Pitt will headline the film as silent film star John Gilbert, with Margot Robbie as actress Clara Bow and Tobey Maguire as the legendary actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. The story of the film will explore Hollywood’s difficult transition from the silent era to “the talkies.”

The supporting cast for Babylon is truly spectacular, including Katherine Waterston, Max Minghella, Flea, Samara Weaving, Rory Scovel, Lukas Haas, Eric Roberts, P.J. Byrne, Damon Gupton, Olivia Wilde, Spike Jonze, Phoebe Tonkin, Jean Smart, Li Jun Li, Jovan Adepo, Diego Calva, Chloe Fineman, Jeff Garlin, and Troy Metcalf. Babylon will open in theaters on December 25.

Blair Marnell
Blair Marnell has been an entertainment journalist for over 15 years. His bylines have appeared in Wizard Magazine, Geek…
The best action scenes in the Mission: Impossible movies, ranked
mission impossible movies best action heist scenes ranked fallout halo sequence

Since it first arrived on the big screen in 1996, the Mission: Impossible film franchise has thrilled audiences with increasingly ambitious practical stunts. Star and producer Tom Cruise won’t be satisfied until he’s shown gravity who’s boss once and for all, diving off of increasingly high platforms at increasingly deadly speeds. The daredevil feats have become such essential parts of the Mission: Impossible films and their marketing that one could almost forget the stories that these stunts are meant to service.
In most M: I movies, at least one of those miraculous action set pieces is attached to some sort of heist or caper. Ethan Hunt is a spy, after all, and his quests typically require that he infiltrate a highly secure location and intercept an important item, person, or piece of information. With respect to the remarkable craft put into each of the daredevil actions, how often is the payoff equal to the setup? Is there a correlation between the magnitude of the danger to Tom Cruise and the stakes to Ethan Hunt? On the occasion of Dead Reckoning Part One’s theatrical release, we’re ranking the action scenes in the Mission: Impossible series and our preferences might surprise you.

7. Stealing the Rabbit’s Foot (Mission: Impossible III)
Mission: Impossible III: Daring Leap (HD CLIP)
Mission: Impossible III gets a bit of a bad rap for its efforts to ground the series in something approaching reality, and it can definitely be argued that director J.J. Abrams’ more TV-style aesthetic was an overcorrection from John Woo’s unrestrained bombast. We’ll stand behind M:I-3’s more human and emotional characterization of Ethan Hunt, the romance subplot, and of course, the outstanding performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the villain, but we do have to admit that the choice to essentially skip this movie’s main heist sequence is pretty disappointing.
In the second act of M:I-3, Ethan’s wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) has been kidnapped by terrorist Owen Davian (Hoffman), who promises to kill her unless Hunt retrieves the mysterious “Rabbit’s Foot” weapon from a secure facility in Shanghai. Hunt goes rogue and, with the help of his team, plans a daring swing between two skyscrapers, using a third, taller building as a fulcrum.
However, while we see Ethan’s leap and his tricky landing on the roof of the facility, we don’t follow him inside for the rest of the heist. Instead, we remain with his teammates Zhen (Maggie Q) and Gorley (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) as they wait to hear whether or not he’s acquired the Rabbits Foot. We only catch up with Ethan once the mission has gone sideways, and Zhen, Gorley, and trusty tech wizard Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) participate in a wild, shaky-cam car chase away from the building’s facility. It’s a cute subversion of the franchise’s usual structure and it allows the plot to continue at an even clip, but for the purposes of this list, we can’t put it anywhere but dead last.

Read more
Is Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1 streaming?
Tom Cruise looks and stares in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

It's been five years since the release of Mission: Impossible - Fallout, but the latest film in the series has finally arrived. Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie have reunited for the new sequel, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1, and this is a story that has finally given Ethan Hunt (Cruise) a foe that he can't easily dispatch. The Entity is something that Ethan has never had to contend with before, and it will push him and his team to their limits.

Mission: Impossible regulars Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Rebecca Ferguson are all back as Luther Stickell, Benji Dunn, and Ilsa Faust, respectively. Vanessa Kirby also reprises her role from Fallout as the White Widow, Alanna Mitsopolis. And for the first time since the original Mission: Impossible film in 1996, Henry Czerny has returned as IMF director Eugene Kittridge.

Read more
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1’s ending, explained
Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell turn around in a small car, looking concerned.

Nearly three years ago, director Christopher McQuarrie started filming Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1, and it's been a long journey to get this sequel on the big screen. Franchise star Tom Cruise has been headlining the Mission: Impossible films since 1996 with increasingly risky stunts and over-the-top action that has kept audiences coming back for more. But Dead Reckoning Part 1 takes things to another level with a story that is too big for a single movie.

By most accounts, Dead Reckoning's two-movie adventure will mark the end of Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his time in the Impossible Mission Force. When the ending comes around for Part 1, Ethan's team has been forever changed, and even bigger challenges lie ahead in Part 2. If you need help making sense of it all, then you've come to the right place because we're about to dive in. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to keep reading, preferably after you've already seen Dead Reckoning Part 1.

Read more