The first trailer for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part One has officially released online – and it's every bit as thrilling as we'd hoped.
The two-minute promotional spot, which was initially screened at CinemaCon last month, leaked to social media for several hours on May 21, though Paramount Pictures has now shared the footage worldwide.
You can check it out via the video link above.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part One (or Mission: Impossible 7) is scheduled for theatrical release on July 14, 2023, with its sequel, Dead Reckoning: Part Two, slated to follow on June 28, 2024.
Frequent series director Christopher McQuarrie returns to the helm on both projects, with Hayley Atwell, Rob Delaney and Indira Varma among those joining existing cast members Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and, of course, Tom Cruise, on the Mission: Impossible 7 call sheet.
Both movies will mark the last in the series for franchise talisman Cruise – though judging by the event's of this first trailer, the veteran actor won't be showing any signs of slowing down.
The footage kicks off with a montage of various exotic locales set to the ominous narration of Henry Czerny's Eugene Kittridge: “Your days of fighting for the greater good are over,” we hear him tell Cruise's Ethan Hunt.
“This is our chance to control the truth, the concepts of right and wrong for everyone for centuries to come,” the original Mission: Impossible character continues. “You’ve been fighting to save an ideal that doesn’t exist, [that] never did. You need to pick a side."
We then see a series of shots showing Hunt on horseback in the desert, smashing through the streets of Rome in a rather expensive BMW, evading capture in a bright yellow Fiat 500, running through a candle-lit cathedral... you get the idea.
The trailer really ups the ante, though, in its final moments, when we see Cruise performing a much-hyped motorcycle stunt from a particularly high cliff-edge in Norway. In a 2021 interview with Deadline, the actor said of the sequence: “This is far and away the most dangerous thing I’ve attempted,” adding that the stunt is something he’s “wanted to do since [he] was a little kid.”
By the looks of things, Cruise certainly wasn't lying.
As mentioned in our previous story on the trailer's leak, fans have been quick to proclaim their excitement for Mission: Impossible 7's roof-raising action. "[A] major side effect of watching the Mission: Impossible trailer is that I am no longer looking forward to any other movie this year and now want to fast forward to 2023,” one Twitter user wrote, while another said that the footage "makes the last Bond film look like a commercial for watches." Ouch.
It's certainly frustrating that we'll have to wait until next year for the return of Ethan Hunt and company, though Cruise fans have a perfect distraction to ease the pain in the form of Top Gun: Maverick (which we awarded five-stars in our review).
