Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One Finally Gets Digital Release

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is finally available to stream legally. The first half of a two-part mega-movie from director Chris McQuarrie, Dead Reckoning Part One dropped at midnight on platforms like Pruime Video, Vudu, and Apple. Previously, Paramount had announced that the film would come to DVD and Blu-ray in November. The movie has taken about three months to get to home video -- a longer-than-usual window, but not anywhere near as huge as the Tom Cruise-led Top Gun: Maverick. Cruise, sometimes discussed as one of the last "real" movie stars who can put butts in seats and make big demands of the studios, has kept the home entertainment window at arm's length even while movies like The Flash and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish headed to the small screen after just a few weeks.

Dead Reckoning Part One debuted just before Oppenheimer and Barbie, meaning that the beloved adventure franchise had to share the largest format screens with Christopher Nolan. That, and the wild popularity of the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon, is likely part of why Dead Reckoning is one of a handful of movies this year that underperformed relative to expectations, while still managing to make hundreds of millions of dollars.

Director Chris McQuarrie previously spoke about the meaning behind of the Dead Reckoning title, which was revealed at CinemaCon along with Cruise's introduction.

"When I came up with the title, I knew it applied more to Part Two than it did to Part One, which is why it eventually settled on being Part One and Part Two," McQuarrie told  Light the Fuse. "The title for the first movie was nearly ... a title that referred to something like a Ghost Protocol kind of thing, it was a government policy – It wasn't a government policy, it was a government, what would you call it? A government measure of last resort, with catastrophic consequences. By the time we got to the end of Part One, that had distilled down into an entirely different set of circumstances that appear in Part Two and not in Part One. So, the word would no longer have been appropriate for the title of Part One."

He continued, "And yet, Dead Reckoning didn't really apply as well to Part One as well as it did to Part Two until we started to play with the beginning of the movie, and kind of recognize that Dead Reckoning, while it sounded cool, what did it really have to do with the movie? And over the course of our, really starting to dig down into the arc of the character journey for Ethan [Hunt], it took on deeper and deeper meanings as we went. And you'll see just how thematic and how it represents, how it's conceptually represented in every character's journey in this film we're in."

Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which premiered in theaters on July 12th. It's the beginning of the end for the action-packed franchise, as Cruise reteams with longtime collaborator and filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie for more death-defying and breathtaking stunts. Hunt and allies Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) attempt to track down a new weapon with the power to tear the world apart. Actors Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, and Esai Morales join the cast for the latest installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, which sets the stage for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two.