New trailer for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a giant love letter to the franchise and Tom Cruise's action star career

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning | Official Trailer (2025 Movie) - Tom Cruise - YouTube Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning | Official Trailer (2025 Movie) - Tom Cruise - YouTube
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The new trailer for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is here, and it highlights Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt explosive past and uncertain future.

From the jump, which you can see above, we have various officials sitting around and talking about Ethan's past exploits. There is, of course, the iconic vault break-in (complete with nerve-shredding proximity to floor sensors) in the first Mission: Impossible, a bomb in the Kremlin in Ghost Protocol, and an infiltration of a top-secret meeting in Dead Reckoning.

Now, though, Ethan is in handcuffs and a big question mark remains: what happened to the Entity and why is Ethan reliving some of his biggest adventures? Heck, there's even a cheeky nod to Top Gun with a sequence with two fighter jets and an aircraft carrier.

If you've been keeping up with all things Mission: Impossible these past few months, you'll be acutely aware that Final Reckoning appears to be getting set up not only as a farewell to Tom Cruise's IMF agent, but as a love letter to the series itself.

Already, fans think they've spotted a reference to Mission: Impossible 3's Rabbit's Foot lurking in one early trailer, while both Henry Czerny and Rolf Saxon return from 1996's Mission: Impossible.

Even without the air of finality surrounding the eighth entry in the series, there's plenty to get your pulses pounding. Alongside the sequences above, we've also received a sneak peek at Cruise looking decidedly nervous before taking on an underwater stunt.

Couple that with director Christopher McQuarrie's declaration that an audience member at an early screening felt like they were going into cardiac arrest, and it's all shaping up to be an edge-of-your-seat thriller like no other.

"We had a small screening and someone said, 'I was suffocating throughout the entire sequence. I almost had a heart attack.' And I thought, 'I guess we did something right," McQuarrie previously told Empire.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Vanessa Kirby, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Pom Klementieff, hits cinemas on May 23, 2025.

Then your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to dive into our ranking of the best Mission: Impossible movies.

Bradley Russell

I'm the Senior Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, focusing on news, features, and interviews with some of the biggest names in film and TV. On-site, you'll find me marveling at Marvel and providing analysis and room temperature takes on the newest films, Star Wars and, of course, anime. Outside of GR, I love getting lost in a good 100-hour JRPG, Warzone, and kicking back on the (virtual) field with Football Manager. My work has also been featured in OPM, FourFourTwo, and Game Revolution.

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