In terms of nothing but sheer quality, Mission: Impossible has rebounded in a major way to become one of the most consistently acclaimed franchises in modern Hollywood, with the last three installments comfortably ranking as a trio of the 21st Century’s finest action blockbusters.
Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and Fallout have set a very high bar for the upcoming seventh and eighth installments to clear, but we actually need to be able to see them first before we can make that judgement. Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 were initially scheduled to shoot back-to-back before the pandemic came along, but the globetrotting production instead became one of COVID-19’s most notorious casualties.
The first and last days of production on the seventh chapter happened 19 months apart, but Paramount have broken the hearts of fans everywhere all over again by shifting M:I 7 ten months from September 2022 to July 2023, with the follow up arriving a full year later.
Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick has experienced similar misfortune, keeping the star away from our screens much longer than anybody could have anticipated. Mission: Impossible will return two years behind schedule, but we’ve got every confidence that returning director Christopher McQuarrie and his leading man have enough up their sleeves to make it worth the wait.