Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One Launches With Near-Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score

July is upon us, which means there are a lot of upcoming movies to look forward to. One such film is Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh installment to the Tom Cruise-led franchise that began back in 1996. The new film marks the third in the series helmed by Christopher McQuarrie, and it sounds like the director has another success on his hands. The first reviews for the new film just landed online, and it’s led to a near-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes.  

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is currently up on Rotten Tomatoes with a 98% critics score after 86 reviews. While the number will likely change as the reviews continue to pour in, this is an extremely promising start for the new movie. For comparison, here’s what the other six Mission: Impossible movies have scored from critics on the review site: Mission: Impossible (1996) has a 67% critics score, Mission: Impossible II (2000) has a 56%, Mission: Impossible III (2006) has a 71%, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) has a 93%, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) has a 94%, and Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) has a 97%. 

What Does “Dead Reckoning” Mean? 

McQuarrie previously spoke about the meaning behind the “Dead Reckoning”, which was revealed during last year’s CinemaCon.

“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 premieres 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 is set to wrap up with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two.