Report: Mission Impossible 8's Budget Is Approaching A Preposterous $400M, And Now The Studio Wants To Promote The Movie As The Franchise's Final Installment While Tom Cruise Wants To Obviously Keep Going

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Mission Impossible's next blockbuster is looming with the first trailer due out in the coming weeks. Fuck yes. I love all of these movies and cannot get enough of them. Pretty much everything after the second one redefines the stakes and sets a new standard for action movies. Fallout may very well be the greatest action movie ever made. Dead Reckoning (previously titled Dead Reckoning Part 1) didn't fall off much at all, but did suffer a little bit at the box office after poor timing of coming out during the same time and Oppenheimer and Barbie. They need a bounce back with the next one no doubt about it. 

Now we're getting news that the budget for the 8th installment in the franchise has reached FOUR HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. An insane number. Unless you're filming a movie space that number shouldn't be a thing. While that was not the plan from the start, all sorts of delays because of the strike and covid led to that number skyrocketing. Paramount Studios has reportedly floated around the idea of promoting this as the final movie in the franchise, as a way to build up hype and get people to the theaters. To no surprise, Tom Cruise wants nothing to do with that idea. If it was up to him he'd do this shit until he was dead. Hell, maybe even after death he'd still be in the Mission movies. It's what he was born to do. 

(Hollywood Reporter) Then, there’s writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s eagerly anticipated Mission: Impossible 8, which is finally wrapped and in post-production. The project has had a long and difficult journey, with a budget that’s reportedly approaching $400 million amid production delays — partly due to the 2023 Hollywood strikes. 

One intriguing wrinkle: Paramount has been interested in promoting M:I 8 as the “final” entry in the action franchise as a way of boosting audience interest. Yet Cruise has been against saying a public goodbye to Ethan Hunt — not surprising, considering the preternaturally youthful actor was quoted last year as saying he hopes to keep making M:I movies into his 80s. (“Harrison Ford is a legend, I’ve got 20 years to catch up with him,” Cruise said. “I hope to keep making Mission: Impossible films until I’m his age.”)

Tom Cruise wants to die being Ethan Hunt. He's 62 years young and probably has another five of these left in him easy, if not more. He wakes up thinking about what Ethan is going to do next. 

As much as I'll always ride for these movies, I still think it was a massive mistake to kill off Illsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) in Dead Reckoning. None of it made sense. In the movie there was barely a moment to acknowledge a massive character had just been wiped away. I was irate and found myself on reddit message boards trying to figure out if it was a fake death. I became obsessed. Then Rebecca Ferguson came out and said she wanted to move on from the character since it was clear they didn't want to feature her more. She had Dune and Silo shoots coming up, so you can understand where her head was at. Still, if killing her off was the agreed upon move, they needed to do it better. I vented about all of that here. 

Still pisses me off they went in that direction. Either way, I'm very excited for the movie coming out next May. I hope it's not the last one and I don't think Tom will let it be. He'd burn the world down if they took Ethan Hunt from him. I'd kill to hear the conversations the studio is having with Tom right now as they navigate the promotion here. I'm gonna take an easy guess that Tom will win here and they'll be planning out the next decade of Mission movies very shortly.