Is Mission: Impossible 8 The Last Movie in the Series?

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is officially here, but is this really the last one? Much has been made for the last few years about where the Mission: Impossible series is going. Tom Cruise is approaching his mid-60s and has made eight of these bad boys now, so how much gas is really left in the tank for something like this? Not only that, but after Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Paramount immediately greenlit a two-parter. That doesn’t usually happen unless you are trying to do a grand finale like Harry Potter or The Avengers. Nobody does a two-parter just for a regular pair of mid-franchise entries.

Things got really serious when we finally found out the name for this movie was Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, implying a sense of finality. Tom Cruise has remained cagey about this actually being the last Mission: Impossible because he doesn’t want to ruin how things unravel in this story, understandably so. If you say, this is really it, it can make people believe that he dies, he loses tremendously, or something else. Still, this is the culmination of Mission: Impossible thus far and Cruise has been jokingly stating in interviews that it’s “not called ‘final’ for nothing.” Everything has led to this movie and it feels climactic. But is this really, truly the end for Ethan Hunt?

Spoilers for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Is Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning the Last Movie in the Series?

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning could be the end if everyone involved wants to walk away. The stakes in this movie are absurdly high and it’s going to be pretty dang hard to raise the stakes in a future movie. However, the door is definitely left open. There’s nothing definitive that would prevent Tom Cruise or any of the main players from coming back to do more Mission: Impossible movies. One character even says at the end of the movie that the world still needs Ethan Hunt, implying there will still be battles for him to fight in the future.

If anything, it seems like no one wants to rule out the chance to do more Mission: Impossible movies should they come up with a story good enough to come back. We know Ethan Hunt will keep doing missions, but we may not actually ever see those missions on screen again. This is it for now as Tom Cruise lines up future projects like Top Gun 3, a Days of Thunder sequel, and a handful of original movies. Given he has worked on these two Mission: Impossible movies since 2019, it’s understandable he’d want a rest to go make other things, especially as he likely has to come to terms with how long he can keep making action movies at the level that he does.

This is seemingly the end of this era of Mission: Impossible. What comes next is up for Cruise to decide, but it wouldn’t be surprising if both Mission: Impossible and Ethan Hunt return sometime within the next 10 years. What exactly Hunt’s role would be going forward is a mystery. Some think Ethan Hunt could take a backseat in future Mission: Impossible movies, allowing him to pass the torch to a young gun actor like Glen Powell, but it’s hard to imagine such a thing at the moment.