How two Mission: Impossible films ended up costing $700 million

Telegraph

26-05-2025

Whatever you make of the latest, and supposedly last, Mission: Impossible film, The Final Reckoning, there is little doubt that it looks like it cost $200 million. Unfortunately it cost twice that, and there is a sense – for the first time in the series – that the action scenes have been somewhat skimped on, the already famous biplane finale apart.
Yet this is not out of penny-pinching on the part of the picture's writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and its all-powerful producer-star Tom Cruise. Instead, this is a reflection of the many, many difficulties and drawbacks that have ensued since The Final Reckoning and the previous picture in the series, Dead Reckoning, were announced the year after the rather less complicated success of 2018's superlative Fallout.
Admittedly, many of the problems that have ensued were nothing to do with Cruise or McQuarrie. Instead, they were caused firstly by Covid and production shutdowns arising from that, and secondly by the WGA and SAG strikes that paralysed Hollywood during the latter half of 2023.
It has always been something of a tradition of the Mission: Impossible series that the pictures are planned around virtuoso set-pieces, and that the storyline and plot developments are then shoehorned in around them. This is seat-of-pants filmmaking, to put it mildly, and can lead to endless reshoots, often at vast expense, in order to make films with relatively simple narratives – the world is threatened by a megalomaniac, and only Ethan Hunt can stop them – coherent.
The declared cost of the last two Mission Impossibles comes in at around $691 million, meaning that they'd have to make over a billion dollars plus between them to break even, let alone turn a profit. After the surprise financial disappointment of Dead Reckoning – which only grossed $571 million worldwide – the pressure is all the higher on The Final Reckoning. Hence Cruise's presence atop the BFI Imax cinema, at the Cannes Film Festival and at numerous global premieres.
Undeniably the last great movie star standing, he is banking on his charisma and audience goodwill towards his best-known character turning the last hurrah of Hunt into a bona fide blockbuster. If he looks at all exhausted, then that is understandable: an awful, awful lot has gone into getting to this point.
Here is a timeline of how the two-part finale of the Mission: Impossible series became the most expensive – and logistically nightmarish – films in contemporary Hollywood.
January 14, 2019: Lift off
Six months or so after Fallout managed to gross $792 million – the highest for the franchise to date – it is announced that McQuarrie will return to write and direct the next two films in the series, to be shot back to back, and to be released, respectively, in the summer of 2021 and summer 2022. At the time, it was expected that Top Gun: Maverick – which Cruise had filmed the previous year – would be released in the summer of 2020, giving him potentially three big box office hits on consecutive years.
February 20, 2020: Filming begins (and stops)
Most of the cast from the previous films returned, with new additions including Nicholas Hoult, who was runner-up to Miles Teller for the role of Rooster in Top Gun: Maverick, to play the villain across both pictures. When Hoult was forced to drop out due to a scheduling conflict with his series The Great, Esai Morales, then best known for his villainous appearance in Ozark, was cast, which in turn led McQuarrie to rethink the films' true antagonist. He and Cruise decided that there should be an AI-based baddie, known only as The Entity, which was capable of creating global chaos.
Unfortunately, a different kind of global chaos was soon caused by the outbreak of Covid, which initially shut down filming in Italy – especially badly hit by the first wave of the virus – and then production altogether. Cruise did not even begin shooting until July 2020.
July 2020: A bridge too far
The dramatic highlight of Dead Reckoning is its last act, train-bound action set-piece, which begins as Murder on the Orient Express and eventually transforms into a dramatic, destructive epic. Yet there was great controversy in how this was to be accomplished. McQuarrie and Cruise initially hoped that they would be able to film the real-life destruction of a bridge in Poland, over Lake Pilchowickie; it had been constructed in 1912 but had fallen into disrepair and was set to be demolished. However, amidst upset at the perceived destruction of a historic landmark – whipped up by a disgruntled former member of the production staff – permission to film was removed and the bridge listed as a site of special historical interest.
'We would never under any circumstances dream of intentionally causing harm to the cultural or historical landmarks we visit, and take great pains to protect those landmarks we feature,' McQuarrie said. But this did not convince the Polish authorities. So the scene had to be filmed instead in the Peak District in August 2021, after further delays caused by Covid.
August 2020: Motorbikes aflame
The film's set-piece stunt – one teased in both trailers and on the posters – is when Cruise drives a motorcycle off an impossibly high cliff in order to be able to catch a train, rather than simply visiting a nearby station like ordinary mortals. The stunt is breathtakingly ambitious, but capturing it led to its own problems. Despite careful planning, and the use of a stuntman rather than Cruise himself, the angle of the motorbike's descent was misjudged and it burst into flames, destroying the £2 million set in the process.
As a source told the Daily Mail at the time of filming: 'Unfortunately, [the angle] was miscalculated. The heat and the friction of the tyres meant that when the bike crashed, the cardboard padding sparked and went up in flames.' Cruise, understandably, was said to be 'very frustrated'.
September 2020: Cruise control
When filming was finally allowed to resume near Norway, Cruise was taking no chances when it came to Covid-proof accommodation. He hired not one but two cruise ships to house the film's cast and crew – the MS Fridtjof Nansen and the MS Versteralen – at a cost of more than $700,000 to him personally. The idea was to create as Covid-secure a bubble as he could, so that production was not disrupted more than wholly necessary.
Still, even though the British government offered production a special exemption so that those filming would not have to quarantine for the usual 14 days if they were coming in and out of the country, the demanding international schedule that the picture required was inevitably at odds with the marauding and disruptive virus: a more implacable nemesis than any that Hunt himself had ever faced.
December 2020: Cruise loses his temper
Dead Reckoning was shot sporadically throughout the remainder of the year, albeit under the most Covid-conscious of circumstances imaginable; while filming in Norway and Italy, production had to be shut down frequently when crew members tested positive for the virus, meaning that it was nearly impossible to proceed. Therefore, when two crew inadvertently broke social distancing measures by standing too close to one another, Cruise lost his temper. In a rant leaked to The Sun, the star shouted, 'I don't ever want to see it again, ever! And if you don't do it you're fired, if I see you do it again you're f–king gone. And if anyone in this crew does it – that's it, and you too and you too.'
He went on, 'We are the gold standard. They're back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us! Because they believe in us and what we're doing. We are creating thousands of jobs you motherf–kers. I don't ever want to see it again!'
Strong words, and it could have been career-damaging for Cruise, who has based much of his public reputation on being hard working but friendly and fair-minded. However, most major figures inside and outside the industry alike sympathised with him and took his side, with George Clooney noting 'He didn't overreact, because it is a problem'.
September 2021: Filming of Dead Reckoning finally concludes
After 18 months, one of the most tortuous production processes in modern Hollywood comes to an end. Cruise had some previous experience of prolonged shoots – his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut took 400 days of consecutive filming – but this interminable, often troubled process set a new bar for difficulty. Most other stars (and directors) might have been forgiven for taking a couple of years off.
But not only did Cruise have post-production and publicity duties to undertake for Top Gun: Maverick (which was co-written and produced by McQuarrie) but it had been agreed that production on the cumbersomely entitled Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part Two would commence in February 2022, with the picture to be released in June 2024. However, by this point, all those involved might have guessed that any plan involving the Mission Impossible franchise had a habit of going awry.
March 2022: Casting shenanigans
It is completely normal for any big-budget blockbuster to reveal their cast bit by bit, especially in the case of Marvel, where some of the highest-profile appearances – Harry Styles in Eternals, for instance – aren't even announced until the film's release, and then lurk in the end credits.
However, in the case of Final Reckoning, it is hard not to feel that some of the casting was being jiggled about with during production. The brilliant Vanessa Kirby, whose White Widow character appeared so memorably during the previous two films, initially indicated that she would return, only to vanish without trace or explanation. (Presumably scheduling conflicts with the Fantastic Four picture led to her disappearance.) She was still being trailed as part of the ensemble as recently as November last year.
Many of the starry cast – Janet McTeer, Hannah Waddingham and, reprising his role from the first picture, Rolf Saxon – were introduced by McQuarrie via his Instagram account. But the sense that the film was deep into reshoots and additional filming literally years after it first began production was only accentuated by the announcement (in April 2024) that Severance's Tramell Tillman had joined the cast, suggesting that the major set-pieces in which he played a part were only being shot very late in the game.
July 2023: Oppenheimer strikes
Although the film's initial tranche of production ran more smoothly than its predecessor's, it took the majority of 2022 to complete filming in the United Kingdom alone, before production could move to other countries and locations. The massive success of Top Gun: Maverick that May helped, and buoyed morale.
Unfortunately, in the summer of 2023, two matters occurred that cast a shadow over production. The first was the SAG strike, which began on July 14 and lasted until November 9, shutting down filming entirely, along with the concurrent Writers' Guild strike. The second, surprisingly given the vast success of Top Gun the previous year and the glowing reviews that Dead Reckoning attracted, was its relative underperformance financially.
It was stymied by the buzzier appearance of the Barbenheimer pictures, the loss of its Imax screens to Oppenheimer and, perhaps, the residual sense that an AI villain is not as interesting to watch on screen as Cruise and McQuarrie had anticipated. There was, however, no question of retooling the in-production Final Reckoning significantly, although it did undergo a title change from the rather lengthier Dead Reckoning – Part Two, suggesting that it is more of a follow-on than a direct sequel. (Spoiler alert, but it definitely is a direct sequel.)
May 2024: The submarine sinks
Production resumed in March 2024, which saw Cruise and the cast return to the exotic environs of Derbyshire, amongst other places, but the film was about to hit an unexpected and near-catastrophic problem. The film's centrepiece is a lengthy submarine-set action scene, which requires the Hunt character to retrieve a McGuffin from underwater. In order to make the scene look as realistic as possible, a $25 million submarine set, which could be suspended from a gimbal, was constructed.
Unfortunately, the submarine was too heavy for the gimbal to bear the weight, necessitating weeks of repair and recalibration. It was by now considered essential that the film meet its revised opening date of May 2025, slightly under two years after the release of Dead Reckoning, and so this – and the film's other major set piece, its concluding biplane fight – had to be filmed against the clock in the summer of 2024.
The submarine had been a source of some controversy ever since Cruise and McQuarrie first suggested that they wanted it featured in the film. Brian Robbins, the CEO of Paramount, had attempted to veto it, which led to disagreement with Cruise. As he later recalled, ''Let's just say that the studio and the production and Tom were in a disagreement over direction, and there was a stalemate going on. We had to hit the pause button.
It was a production issue, and it was about the scope of what was being asked for. And the question we needed to ask was do we need this and why? And then how big is it going to be, and how long is that going to take?' Eventually, it was resolved, but not without significant angst and cost.
November 2024: Post-production (at last)
At some point between July and November, principal photography concluded, and the film – which had begun shooting around two and a half years before – finally moved into post-production. Even here, however, matters were not plain sailing. The series' regular composer Lorne Balfe, who had done such memorable work on the previous two pictures, was replaced by his former assistants Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey: both comparatively untested when it came to scoring such a big-budget picture.
Word got out that the total budget had ballooned to $400 million, making Final Reckoning the fourth most expensive film ever made, if estimates are to be believed. And Cruise's decision to film the new Alejandro G. Iñárritu film between November 2024 and April in 2025 meant that his involvement in post-production was inevitably compromised by his responsibilities to the new picture; although his decision to do both in London meant that he was at least able to segue from one to the other.
May 2025 – the premiere
At last, nearly eight and a half years after the two Mission: Impossible films were announced, The Final Reckoning has enjoyed a high-profile series of premieres in Cannes, Tokyo and London, with Cruise, the showman himself, posing by a biplane similar to that used in the picture. The first reviews have been more mixed than for the other McQuarrie pictures (this newspaper's critic Robbie Collin called it 'one of the most dazzlingly ambitious, exactingly crafted studio projects of our time'; whereas the Hollywood Reporter lamented that it was 'a disappointing farewell with a handful of high points courtesy of the indefatigable lead actor') and it remains to be seen whether it can take the box office by storm, or if that is a mission too far.
Still, Cruise remains indomitable. When asked whether he could imagine making action films into his Eighties, a la Harrison Ford, he promised – or threatened – that 'I said I'm going to make movies into my 80s; actually, I'm going to make them into my 100s… I will never stop. I will never stop doing action, I will never stop doing drama, comedy films – I'm excited.' Let us hope that this supposedly final reckoning does not dampen his spirit.