Every Mission Impossible movie ranked — including the 1969 one without Tom Cruise that outranks two of his
Tom Cruise made eight Mission: Impossible movies over 29 years. The franchise's first feature film was two 1967 TV episodes edited together, and it beats two of them.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opened on May 23, 2025, and made $598.8 million worldwide) on a budget reported at $300 million to $400 million. Christopher McQuarrie said he hoped it was the satisfying conclusion to a 30-year story arc, and nobody has announced a ninth film. That makes eight Cruise movies, plus one most fans have never seen.
In 1969, Paramount released Mission: Impossible vs. the Mob, a 110-minute feature cut from "The Council," a two-part episode from the TV show's second season. It played theaters in parts of Europe, Australia and Japan and never opened in the US. Peter Graves leads as Jim Phelps, with Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Greg Morris and Peter Lupus as the team.
The order here comes down to what the series promised from the start: a team, a con, a mask and a plan that goes wrong in an interesting way.
9. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)
John Woo brought doves, slow motion and a motorcycle joust, and Robert Towne has sole screenplay credit. The plot borrows the love triangle of Hitchcock's Notorious and wraps it around a virus called Chimera. Ethan's team barely exists, and nobody runs a con.
It made $546 million and holds the series' lowest Rotten Tomatoes score, under 60%. It also cost Dougray Scott, who played the villain, the role of Wolverine. The shoot ran long, and Scott later said Cruise wouldn't let him leave for X-Men, so Hugh Jackman got the claws (via SlashFilm).
8. The Final Reckoning (2025)
The submarine sequence and the biplane fight are among the best stunt work in the series, and they sit inside the longest, most talk-heavy film in it. The second half of the Entity story spends most of its first hour explaining the first half.
"inanely plotted, clotted with expository dialogue"
— John Powers, NPR (via Rotten Tomatoes)
The money is just as rough. Studios keep roughly half of what a movie grosses in theaters, and half of $598.8 million doesn't cover even the low end of that budget, before marketing. Its 80% on Rotten Tomatoes is the lowest of the McQuarrie era.
7. Mission: Impossible vs. the Mob (1969)
A crime syndicate is buying up honest businesses and moving millions into Swiss accounts, fast enough to drain US gold reserves. The team plants fake newspaper stories so the mob kills its own men, then digs the "victims" back up alive. Rollin Hand finishes the job by putting on a mask and becoming the boss.
There are no car chases and no stunts, and the plan itself is the action, scored by Lalo Schifrin. The writing credits list Allan Balter, William Read Woodfield and Robert Towne, the same Towne who got sole screenplay credit on No. 9 31 years later. It ranks above two Cruise films because it does the one thing they don't: it runs a con from start to finish.
6. Mission: Impossible III (2006)
J.J. Abrams made his feature debut here and brought the franchise back to a human scale: Ethan has a fiancée, and his villain sounds like he means it. Philip Seymour Hoffman's Owen Davian is the best antagonist the series ever had. The Rabbit's Foot, the MacGuffin everyone chases, is never explained, and the film is better for it.
It's also the lowest grosser of the eight, at $398.5 million.
5. Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
Cruise drives a motorcycle off a Norwegian cliff, and the Orient Express goes over a broken bridge one car at a time. Hayley Atwell's Grace is the series' best new team member since Ilsa. The Entity, an AI villain with no face, plays better in 2023 than it did two years later.
The budget swelled to $291 million through pandemic shutdowns, and the film opened a week before Barbie and Oppenheimer took over every screen. It finished at $571.1 million.
4. Mission: Impossible (1996)
Brian De Palma's original still has the best single scene in the series: Ethan on a wire above the vault floor at Langley. The script by David Koepp and Robert Towne also did something the original show's star objected to. It made Jim Phelps, now played by Jon Voight, the traitor.
"…brought myself to play him as a bad guy."
— Peter Graves, to the Daily News, via Deseret News, May 1996
Graves played Phelps for six seasons of the original show and in No. 7 on this list. Cruise's first movie built its twist out of the hero of the franchise's first feature.
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3. Rogue Nation (2015)
McQuarrie's first film opens with Cruise hanging off the side of an Airbus A400M during takeoff, and that's just the cold open. The Vienna opera sequence, staged during Turandot, introduces Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust, the series' best character after Ethan. Sean Harris's Solomon Lane gave the franchise its first villain worth bringing back.
2. Ghost Protocol (2011)
Brad Bird came from The Incredibles and Ratatouille and made the series' first true team movie: the IMF is disavowed after the Kremlin blows up, and four agents have to work with whatever gear survives. Then Cruise climbs the outside of the Burj Khalifa. At $694.7 million, it was the franchise's highest grosser until the next entry on this list.
1. Fallout (2018)
Fallout has the HALO jump, the helicopter chase, Henry Cavill reloading his fists and the best reviews in the series, at 98%. It's also the biggest earner, at $791.7 million. Every piece of the formula lands at once: the team, the masks, a plan that falls apart and a villain from the last movie.
"I knew instantly my ankle was broken."
— Tom Cruise, on the London rooftop jump (via Far Out)
Cruise kept running, the take stayed in the movie, and production shut down for six weeks while he healed. The film still opened on schedule.
Cruise told Entertainment Tonight that The Final Reckoning isn't called final for nothing, and Paramount hasn't announced anything since. If the studio ever wants a ninth Mission: Impossible without him, it made one in 1969, at the cost of two TV episodes.
Previously we wrote: Is Avengers: Secret Wars about to be delayed? A new filming rumor has fans betting on 2028