All the buzz and marketing around Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning has been that the eighth movie of the Tom Cruise action franchise will likely be its last. But is it really?
The Final Reckoning certainly has all the hallmarks of a final film: It is full of references, flashbacks, and callbacks to previous films, and even brings back characters like Willian Donloe (Rolf Saxon) from the first Mission: Impossible. And most importantly, the movie’s Big Bad, The Entity, is an AI “anti-god” that Ethan Hunt inadvertently helped create.
But when all is said and done, is Ethan Hunt alive to accomplish another mission? Will the world still need the IMF to step in to save the day? Let’s dive into the ending of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, and what it means for the future of the franchise.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning Ending, Explained
Dead Reckoning introduced The Entity, an all-powerful, omniscient AI with the power to rewrite the truth. And in the months that have passed since the events of Dead Reckoning, The Entity has been steadily amassing power, toppling governments and earning the feverish following of a doomsday cult, called “Children of the Atom,” devoted to ridding the world of corruption. The Entity’s plan to destroy all corruption? Total nuclear annihilation, of course.
As Ethan Hunt and his team had been formulating a plan on how to use the crucible key to destroy The Entity once and for all, The Entity has been slowly been taking over every single nuclear arsenal around the world, with the U.S. remaining the last stronghold. But thanks to the efforts of Luther (Ving Rhames), Ethan now possesses a piece of malware called a “poison pill,” which, if plugged into The Entity’s source code, will destroy it for good. There are only a few problems: because The Entity has infiltrated so deeply into every country’s system, its destruction could plunge the world into economic calamity. And, The Entity’s source code is at the bottom of the Bering Sea in a crashed stealth submarine.
As if Ethan couldn’t be more personally invested in bringing down The Entity, we also learn the origins of the malicious AI: its source code is actually the Rabbit’s Foot, the mysterious device that was at the center of an arm’s race in Mission: Impossible III, and which Ethan inadvertently activated to become the mythical “anti-god.” Now, The Entity is fulfilling its title as the anti-god, and seeking to destroy all human life.
With only four days left before The Entity launches global nuclear strikes, U.S. President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) — against her Cabinet’s wishes — tasks Ethan Hunt with the truly impossible mission of finding the source code and destroying it. But Ethan is foiled at every turn by other countries seeking to control The Entity, as well as Gabriel, who has been abandoned by the AI. In the end, Ethan manages to retrieve the source code module from the sub and take it to a data center in a South African bunker, where the team plans to upload it on a physical drive, trapping it from the outside world. But when Gabriel shows up, followed by Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham) — the latter of whom is revealed to be Jim Phelps’ son — Gabriel makes off with the source code, leading Ethan to give chase on a biplane. At the last second, Ethan manages to dispatch with Gabriel and connect the poison pill into the source code module, trapping The Entity on the drive and saving the world from nuclear winter.
Will There Be More Mission: Impossible Movies?
Despite prevailing theories that Mission: Impossible would only end when Ethan Hunt (or Tom Cruise) kicked the bucket, both make it out of the movie alive. The film ends with Grace (Hayley Atwell) handing Ethan the physical drive containing The Entity, while the rest of the team — including Benji (Simon Pegg), Paris (Pom Klementieff), Theo Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), and Donloe — part ways with knowing nods. Apart from Luther (RIP), they all made it out alive. So could this mean that The Final Reckoning is not, in fact, the final time we’ll be seeing Ethan Hunt and the IMF?
It will probably be the last... for the time being. Cruise has lined up a few projects with other directors like Alejandro Iñárritu and plans to reunite with Final Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie on “several different films.” None of those are confirmed to be Mission: Impossible films, and Cruise hasn’t indicated that he plans to make another one anytime soon. But who knows? It’s clear that Hunt and his team live on, and there will always be another impossible mission to accomplish.
