Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to play the Mission: Impossible theme in your head as you mark down the following dates in your handy movie release calendar:
Mission: Impossible 7 - July 23, 2021Mission: Impossible 8 - August 5, 2022
Funny to think we're already planning things for 2022. It was already revealed that star Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie would be returning for two more M:I films, to be released back-to-back. (Some other more unexpected familiar faces may also return.) Previously, we just heard plans for "summer 2021" and "summer 2022," but Paramount isn't playing around. They are locking in some dates. Maybe the dates will move down the line, or maybe every other movie will stay out of their way.
Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie are hot off the success of Mission: Impossible 6, aka Fallout, which was incredible. As Deadline noted, Mission: Impossible - Fallout was the highest-grossing film of the franchise to date, showing there's still a lot of life in this series.
Mission: Impossible - Fallout was released in July 2018 and made $791,115,104 worldwide. Christopher McQuarrie also wrote and directed the previous movie, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, which came out in 2015 and made $682,714,267.
The Mission: Impossible movies have made $3.5 billion worldwide so far, and these two newcomers will mark four in a row for Christopher McQuarrie. Will 7 and 8 be the final Mission: Impossible movies? We'll see.
Hopefully Tom Cruise gets through the next two action films without more injuries. The guy is 56 right now. His birthday was July 3, 1962, which means Mission: Impossible 8 will arrive when he turns 60. (I bet you anything he'll look exactly the same.)
Despite pushing 60, Tom Cruise still insists on doing most if not all of his own stunts. He does a great job, but he also broke his ankle during one Fallout stunt that delayed production (although apparently that delay was a good thing). And people on set thought he might've broken his back during a helicopter stunt, but that stunt turned out OK. Well, more than OK, really.
Christopher McQuarrie had previously teamed up with Tom Cruise as the writer of Valkyrie and Edge of Tomorrow, and writer/director of Jack Reacher. McQuarrie also wrote Top Gun: Maverick, the Top Gun sequel set for release on June 26, 2020.
So Tom Cruise plans to have some pretty busy summers in the next few years.
So far, Tom Cruise has a pretty great track record with Ethan Hunt. But it's probably smart of Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie to sit out 2019, since it's already jam-packed with potential blockbusters. Keep up with everything in our handy 2019 movie schedule.
