Paramount Pictures played an epic practical joke on Mission: Impossible fans on Wednesday, with a stream of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning on the Paramount Movies official YouTube channel. For the many viewers tuning in for the “stream” of the Tom Cruise-led action blockbuster, it turned out to be a graphic of an old radio, with the movie’s script being read in morse code. As part of the stream, Paramount joked in the video’s description that “the Entity has infiltrated every major streaming platform, so this livestream was compromised. The full script had to be transmitted in Morse Code to avoid detection. We need your help decoding it. Your mission begins now”, the Entity being the villainous A.I. program of The Final Reckoning.
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At writing, The Final Reckoning‘s YouTube morse code stream is not available for re-watches. The stream and the graphic used for it (seen below) are both a great marketing spin on The Final Reckoning‘s story, which boasts far higher stakes and a true save-the-world mandate for Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt than any preceding Mission: Impossible movie.
In Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (purportedly the final installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise), a powerful A.I. program known as the Entity has gained sentience and has begun infiltrating the nuclear databases of every nation with a nuclear arsenal, with Entity prepping to an apocalyptic nuclear launch in three days. Worse still, Ethan’s enemy from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part One Gabriel (Esai Morales) is determined to bring the Entity under his own control. It is up to Ethan Hunt and the Impossible Missions Force to put a stop to the Entity with the literal fate of all humanity hanging in the balance.
The Mission: Impossible franchise began as the 1960’s spy TV series of the same name, with Tom Cruise, a fan of the show, starring in and producing the first Mission: Impossible movie in 1996. The success of the first big-screen Mission: Impossible led to seven sequels produced over 29 years, with Cruise reprising his role as Ethan Hunt as well as producing each installment. The Mission: Impossible series has been a huge commercial success, amassing a colossal $4.74 billion worldwide box office haul while cementing Cruise’s legacy as an action hero.
Indeed, the Mission: Impossible franchise has been instrumental in establishing Cruise’s reputation for death-defying stunt work. From the unforgettable rock climbing opening of Mission: Impossible 2 to the extended train chase/crash in Dead Reckoning: Part One, Cruise has shown a predilection for incredible stunt work that rivals Jackie Chan in his heyday. With the making of The Final Reckoning, Cruise dove right back in to harrowing Mission: Impossible stunts for the action-packed spy movie. Literally so, in fact, with the movie’s life-threatening extended underwater and submarine sequence, along with Cruise also hanging onto a sailing biplane in the movie’s finale with all the vigor of his aerial stunts in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick.
With A.I. becoming such a heavy facet of modern technology, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning takes the franchise into full-blown Terminator territory that few could have ever expected of it. With the Entity positioned as such a cold technological adversary, Paramount has added some light-hearted levity to the movie’s stakes with their fun morse code stream of The Final Reckoning. Hopefully, Paramount makes the Special Edition stream of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning available to re-watch on Paramount Movies, in order for the widest possible audience to be in on the studio’s splendid joke.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is available digitally on Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies, Fandango At Home, and Apple TV, and will be released on Blu-ray and 4K on October 14th.
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