Skip to main content

‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ director says the movie has ‘the most difficult thing we’ve ever done’

Tom Cruise stares with a concerned look on his face.
Paramount Pictures

The Mission: Impossible movies are known at this point for including at least one death-defying stunt from star Tom Cruise. Cruise seems hellbent on putting his life in danger for the benefit of audiences, and thus far, that dedication has led to some pretty excellent movies.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning may or may not be the final installment in the franchise, but director Christopher McQuarrie is already suggesting that the movie has one of the biggest stunts in the franchise’s history. In speaking with Empire (per GamesRadar), he said that the film contains “the most difficult thing” they’ve ever done with the series. Unfortunately, he didn’t go into detail about what the sequence involved.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning | Teaser Trailer (2025 Movie) - Tom Cruise

McQuarrie did detail a test screening, though, and the sequence went over exactly the way he had hoped. “We had a small screening and someone said, ‘I was suffocating throughout the entire sequence. I almost had a heart attack.’ And I thought, ‘I guess we did something right,” he explained.

Recommended Videos

The Final Reckoning is set to pick up many of the plot threads that were left dangling in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, as Cruise’s Ethan Hunt faces off against the artificial intelligence known as The Entity. The first trailer for the new film suggests that Cruise will hang off of at least one plane, fight plenty of bad guys, and also do something daring underwater. While we don’t know which sequence was the most difficult, it’s safe to say the movie will contain plenty of stunts.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

The Final Reckoning is set to hit theaters on May 23, 2025.

Joe Allen
Joe Allen is a freelance writer at Digital Trends, where he covers Movies and TV. He frequently writes streaming…
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’s action scenes, ranked
Tom Cruise rides a motorcycle in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is an undeniable achievement. Like all of the Mission: Impossible movies before it, the film features more awe-inspiring, death-defying stunts than it rightly should. As a result, while the film’s place on fans’ personal Mission: Impossible rankings remains unclear right now, what’s less uncertain is whether or not Dead Reckoning Part One has managed to maintain its franchise’s track record of blowing moviegoers away. Spoiler alert: It definitely, definitely has.

Now that the film is playing in theaters nationwide, the conversations surrounding its action sequences have only intensified. But which of Dead Reckoning Part One’s stunts, you may be wondering, is its best? And which is its worst? Wonder no more. Here are Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’s stunts, ranked from the most to least thrilling.
5. Ethan’s runaway fistfight

Read more
Why the first Mission: Impossible movie is still the best one
A man looks out from the shadows in Mission: Impossible.

Everyone loves the Mission: Impossible movies. There are a variety of reasons why: they offer old-fashioned cinematic thrills; they are a form of escapism akin to the James Bond movies, but tougher and more American; they feature one of the last truly great movie stars, Tom Cruise. Ever since the fourth installment, Ghost Protocol, resurrected the genre from pop culture oblivion, the conventional wisdom is that the modern M: I films just keep getting better and better, and are the series' best entries.

Well, nuts to that. I'm not going to defend the much-maligned M: I 2, which doesn't really deserve reconsideration (seriously, what's with all those doves?), but the original Mission: Impossible, in my eyes, is perfection, and hasn't been topped by any other M: I film ... or any action movie, for that matter. The peak of '90s Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking, Mission: Impossible delivers two cinematic giants, Cruise and director Brian De Palma, at the height of their powers, and is perhaps the most fun mainstream movie Hollywood ever produced. Here are just a few reasons why the original M: I still holds up today.
The opening titles
Mission: Impossible (1996) Opening Title Sequence

Read more
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