Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One finally came to theaters last year after a longer than expected wait due to COVID. If you decided to wait for it to hit streaming, good news: it’s hitting Paramount+ next Friday, January 25.
But when it arrives there, it’ll be dropping the “Part One” from its subtitle. It’s been known for a few years that it and its eventual follow-up were coming as a two-part package deal that was originally meant to wrap up Ethan Hunt’s story. Things have changed, though: last year, Tom Cruise said he’d like to keep doing these movies basically he literally can’t anymore. And when the sequel was delayed due to the Hollywood strikes, Paramount dropped the subtitle and referred to it as Mission: Impossible 8, which is dropping in summer 2025.
Dead Reckoning opened to solid reviews, but in terms of box office, it made $567.5 million worldwide and was 2023’s 10th highest-grossing film. Impressive as that sounds, it didn’t perform quite as well as 2015’s Rogue Nation ($688.9M) and 2018’s Fallout ($791.1M). Part of that can be attributed to other movies out at the time; it released in mid-July, a few weeks before Barbie and Oppenheimer would effectively dominate that entire month. (Cruise reportedly went to war with Universal over the latter film taking up his movie’s IMAX screenings). No one really predicted how either of those would piggyback off each other and be individually great on their own to become two of the biggest movies of 2023.
But it also probably didn’t help that Dead Reckoning openly advertised itself a part one in its title. That descriptor implies it effectively can’t actually end until a “Part Two” theoretically comes a year or two later. That’s not a hard science, though—we all saw Avengers: Infinity War knowing it Endgame was coming the following year, while Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse being a two-parter took most by surprise. But for a franchise that comes once every three or four years, going out on a card saying “End Act One” may have hurt the film’s prospects.
Either way, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning hits Paramount+ on January 25, and you can determine for yourself how well it works on its own merits.
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