Final Mission Eight

Description

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a 2025 American action spy film that follows Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) and is the eighth installment in the Mission: Impossible film series that stars Tom Cruise. The film is directed by Christopher McQuarrie from a screenplay he co-wrote with Erik Jendresen.

Cruise stars as Ethan Hunt, alongside an ensemble cast including Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, and Angela Bassett.

In the film, Hunt and his Impossible Mission Force team work to prevent the Entity, a rogue AI, from unleashing global destruction against humanity.

In January 2019, Cruise announced that the seventh and eighth Mission: Impossible films would be shot back to back with McQuarrie co-writing and directing both films. Plans for the eighth film later changed in February 2021. Returning and new cast members were announced soon after, including Lorne Balfe, who composed the score for two other films in the series: Balfe was later replaced by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey. Principal photography began in March 2022 but was halted in July 2023 due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. Production resumed in March 2024 and concluded that November, with filming locations including England, Malta, South Africa and Norway. The film, originally titled Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two, dropped its subtitle in October 2023, and the new subtitle was announced in November 2024. With an estimated budget of $300–400 million, it is nominally one of the 20 most expensive films ever made.

The Final Reckoning had its world premiere in Tokyo on May 5, 2025, was screened out of competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival on May 14, and was theatrically released in the United States on May 23, by Paramount Pictures. The film received positive reviews from critics and has grossed $353 million worldwide, becoming the seventh highest-grossing film of 2025, in addition to having the largest opening weekend of the franchise.

Two months after retrieving the key to the source code for the malevolent artificial intelligence known as the Entity,^[b] Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt receives a message from US President Erika Sloane: the Entity continues to seize control of global nuclear systems, aided by an undercover doomsday cult; Ethan is ordered to surrender the key, but he refuses and continues pursuing Gabriel, now the Entity’s former proxy.

In London, Ethan and fellow IMF agent Grace are captured by Gabriel; Gabriel coerces Ethan into retrieving the « Podkova » module, revealed to be the « Rabbit’s Foot, »^[c] from the sunken Russian submarine Sevastopol, which would give Gabriel control over the Entity’s source code. Ethan and Grace escape with the aid of IMF agent Benji Dunn, and recruit Gabriel’s erstwhile lieutenant Paris and Theo Degas, a CIA agent previously tasked with apprehending Ethan. A device used by Gabriel to communicate with the Entity shows Ethan a vision of a coming nuclear apocalypse, and the Entity demands access to a digital bunker in South Africa to ensure its physical survival.

Ethan sends his team to retrieve the Sevastopol‘s coordinates and races to save Luther Stickell from Gabriel, who steals the « Poison Pill » malware for the Entity developed by Luther and traps him with a nuclear time bomb. Luther sacrifices himself, preemptively triggering one of the device’s detonators to minimize the blast, and Ethan is brought to Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center. With four days until the Entity launches nuclear armageddon, Ethan convinces Sloane to let him locate the Sevastopol, against CIA Director Eugene Kittridge‘s objections.

While Ethan joins the aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush in the North Pacific Ocean, his team travels to St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea, home to a Cold War–era naval sonar array that detected the Sevastopol‘s sinking. They meet former CIA analyst William Donloe, who was exiled to the island decades earlier after Ethan’s break-in at CIA headquarters and memorized the Sevastopol‘s coordinates. Captured by Russian special forces seeking the coordinates, Grace and Donloe’s wife Tapeesa escape by dog sled, and the others fight off the soldiers as Donloe transmits the coordinates to Ethan.

Receiving the coordinates aboard the submarine USS Ohio, Ethan is saved from a doomsday operative, and uses an experimental diving suit to reach the Sevastopol and retrieve the Podkova, as the wreck slides down the continental shelf. Narrowly escaping without his air supply, Ethan is revived from decompression sickness by Grace and Tapeesa using a portable decompression chamber. Reunited with his team, Ethan plans to plug the Poison Pill into the Podkova, fooling the Entity into trapping itself at the bunker onto a physical drive.

At the bunker, the team is ambushed by Gabriel with another timed nuclear device. He demands the Podkova, but the handover is interrupted by Kittridge, who wants control of the Entity at the US government’s behest. The bomb is activated in the ensuing firefight and Gabriel flees, knowing Ethan will pursue him. Paris performs emergency surgery on a critically injured Benji as he guides Grace through rebooting the bunker systems to trap the Entity. Like Luther, Donloe preempts the bomb but buys enough time for himself and the others to escape the explosion.

Sloane chooses not to sacrifice millions of lives with a preemptive strike, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is fatally wounded protecting her from a doomsday assassin, but the Entity gains total control of the world’s nuclear weapons. Ethan chases Gabriel in a biplane and climbs onto Gabriel’s plane mid-air, recovering the Poison Pill. A gloating Gabriel attempts to parachute to safety, but his skull is split open by the plane’s rudder. Ethan finds a second parachute and plugs the Poison Pill into the Podkova in midair, allowing Grace to download and trap the Entity within a tenth of a second before all nuclear weapons are launched.

Ethan presents a disappointed Kittridge with the destroyed Podkova, and agent Jasper Briggs—revealed to be the son of Ethan’s original team leader Jim Phelps^[d]—makes peace with Ethan for exposing his father as a traitor. Reuniting in London, Grace gives Ethan the drive containing the Entity, and the IMF team go their separate ways.