Tom Cruise has spent nearly thirty years dangling off the sides of buildings, planes, and cliffs to entertain you, and this weekend he took what may be his final bow. “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” opened in theaters on May 23, 2025, billed as the conclusion to Ethan Hunt’s decades-long story, and it arrives carrying the weight of an era ending. This is not just another spy caper. It is the send-off for one of the last true movie stars doing the last true movie-star thing: risking his neck for real, in front of a camera, so you gasp in a dark room. Whatever its flaws, that deserves a moment of respect.
Let us set the scene. “The Final Reckoning” picks up directly from the cliffhanger of 2023’s “Dead Reckoning,” throwing Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF crew into a last-ditch scramble to save the world from a threat that has been building across the recent films. Christopher McQuarrie, who has become Cruise’s essential creative partner across the last several entries, returns to direct, and the result is exactly the kind of globe-trotting, physics-defying, hold-your-breath spectacle this series has perfected. The stunts remain the headline, and they remain genuinely staggering. Warning: beyond this point there are spoilers for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and the conclusion of Ethan Hunt’s story.
It is the send-off for one of the last true movie stars doing the last true movie-star thing: risking his neck for real, in front of a camera, so you gasp in a dark room.”
Critics largely responded warmly, and the praise landed where you would expect: McQuarrie’s confident direction, Cruise’s total commitment, the returning ensemble, and action sequences that continue to raise the bar for the entire genre. The knocks were about heft — a long runtime and a second act that sags under the weight of everything it is trying to resolve. That is a forgivable sin for a finale attempting to tie a bow on decades of story, though it is a real one. When a movie is this determined to be an event, it sometimes forgets to be lean.
The emotional pitch here is the sendoff. Reviews have described the film as a sentimental farewell to Ethan Hunt that still accomplishes its mission with the franchise’s trademark flair for the impossible, and that dual nature — heartfelt goodbye plus jaw-dropping set pieces — is exactly the note a finale like this needs to hit. The returning faces matter enormously to that. The long-serving members of the IMF family, the allies Ethan has gathered across the years, all get their moment, and the film clearly understands that after this many movies, the audience is attached to the whole crew, not just the man doing his own skydiving.
Now the part worth watching closely, because it complicates the victory lap. The film posted the biggest opening weekend in the entire franchise’s history, around $79 million domestically, which sounds like a triumph and, in isolation, is one. The catch is the price tag. This is one of the most expensive movies ever made, with a reported budget soaring into the hundreds of millions, and a record opening does not automatically translate to profit when the mountain you have to climb is that steep. The franchise has never spent like this, and “The Final Reckoning” now has to leg out an enormous run just to justify its own scale. A great opening and a nervous accountant can absolutely coexist.
The BR team has complicated feelings about that math, and they are not really about this one movie. They are about what it represents. Cruise has become the standard-bearer for a particular kind of blockbuster — practical, star-driven, built on genuine risk rather than digital weightlessness — and the enormous cost of sustaining that vision raises real questions about whether this style of filmmaking can survive. If even a beloved franchise finale struggles to justify its budget, it gets harder to argue for the next filmmaker who wants to actually hang a movie star off a real airplane. That would be a genuine loss.
Here is where we land, and we land firmly. “The Final Reckoning” is a fitting, big-hearted, occasionally overstuffed farewell to a character and a star who have given audiences some of the purest theatrical thrills of the last three decades. It is not flawless — it is too long, and it strains under its own ambitions in the middle — but it understands the assignment, which is to make you feel the weight of a goodbye while still delivering the impossible. For a finale, that is the mission that matters, and it accomplishes it.
For those of us tracking “Mission: Impossible” as one continuous, ever-escalating saga — from the taut original through the increasingly death-defying recent run — “The Final Reckoning” is the capstone, the movie the whole series has been building toward. Whether Cruise truly hangs up the harness or finds a reason to return someday, this is the film that treats his farewell with the grandeur it has earned. Ethan Hunt chose to accept a lot of impossible missions. This one, saying goodbye, might have been the hardest, and Cruise sticks the landing the way he always does. On his own two feet, having done the stunt for real.
What Do You Think? Does “The Final Reckoning” earn its status as a proper send-off for Ethan Hunt, or does its bloated runtime keep it from being the perfect finale the character deserved? With a budget this enormous, is Tom Cruise’s brand of practical, star-driven blockbuster becoming financially impossible to sustain, even when the movies are great? And after nearly thirty years, do you actually believe this is the end for Ethan Hunt, or will the impossible mission call him back one more time?
See you on the next binge!
