Much of the discourse around Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning revolves around that penultimate word. This, we’re told, is it. This is the last time thatTom Cruisewill leap out of various modes of high-speed transport in pursuit of some nebulously defined MacGuffin. The last time he’ll grit his teeth and run across a major global landmark. The last time he’ll give Simon Pegg work. This is it.
Except, not to spoil anything, but it probably isn’t. After years of avoiding the press and letting his work do the talking, Tom Cruise is actively promoting Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. He’s doing junkets. He’s giving red-carpet interviews. He’s giving talks at the BFI. For those of us who enjoy Tom Cruise, this is a rare gift. But over the course of these appearances, a message has started to form. That message is: Tom Cruise is never, ever going to stop.
A case in point. At the New York premiere on Sunday night, Cruise repeated something he’s mentioned over and over during the course of the film’s promotion. A Hollywood Reporter interviewer mentioned that, just two years ago, Cruise had said that he wanted to make Mission: Impossible films when he was in his 80s. Cruise then corrected the interviewer. “I actually said I’m going to make movies into my 80s; actually, I’m going to make them into my 100s,” he said. “I will never stop. I will never stop doing action, I will never stop doing drama, comedy films – I’m excited.”
For reference, Tom Cruise will turn 63 in six weeks. This means that he won’t turn 100 until the summer of 2062. If he sticks to his plan – and he seems very much like someone who sticks to his plans – then we have another 37 years of Tom Cruise films ahead of us. In other words, we exist at a point in time that is closer to the theatrical release of Born on the Fourth of July than it is to the end of his career.
What glories must await us before then. First, Cruise will make a renewed bid for the world to see him as an actor and not just a crash-test dummy bystarring in the new Alejandro G Iñárritu film. Then there are all the sequels he wants to make: another Top Gun, another Days of Thunder, with any luck anotherEdge of Tomorrow. He’s talked about doing musicals. At one point he was literally going to film in space, and you have to imagine that this wouldn’t be a project he’d be keen to drop. In all honesty there will probably be another Mission: Impossible before then. His dance card is full for the foreseeable.
However, it should be noted that several obstacles stand in his way. Notably, there is the death of cinema to navigate. Revenues are down, seats are going unfilled and nobody can predict what will or won’t be a hit any more. It’s a downward spiral that Cruise has beaten once, with Top Gun: Maverick, but it should equally be noted that the Mission: Impossible film before this one was the lowest-grossing instalment in the series since 2006’s Mission: Impossible III. The Final Reckoning is said to have a whopping production budget of $400,000,000, which means it will need to make close to a billion dollars to just break even. That wouldn’t be sustainable at any point, much less when a vast chunk of the audience will just wait for it to stream.
What else could stop him? Well, there’s the looming threat of the third world war, environmental collapse, the rise of AI as an industry-ending threat. The world has changed beyond belief in the last 37 years, and it is likely to have changed even more 37 years from now. But Tom Cruise isn’t someone who will give up in the face of something as trivial as existential threat. If he has to make his own movies on a phone and hand deliver them to whatever cinemas haven’t been repurposed into nuclear fallout shelters, then that is what he’ll do.
Because he is Tom Cruise. If he wants to keep making films when he’s 100, he will keep making films when he’s 100. The bigger question is what he’ll do for the thousands of years after that, because let’s not kid ourselves that the man is mortal.