In the final act of 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, the seventh installment in Tom Cruise’s three-decade-running action franchise, one of the central tensions revolves around a character debating whether or not to accept a multi-million-dollar bribe from an antagonist in the form of an encrypted blockchain payment. It’s one of the few instances of a major Hollywood production incorporating cryptocurrency into its narrative in a way that feels neither garish nor derogatory – it simply presents an objective view of the technical reality.
The scene wasn’t designed to send viewers racing out of the theater to check the Bitcoin price live, nor was it engineered to thumb its nose at the tech. Instead, this scene illustrates the unique balance the Mission: Impossible franchise has struck between embracing modernity while remaining steadfastly true to its traditional roots.
A Film About Crusading for Truth Against AI
In so many ways, the two-part finale of the Mission: Impossible franchise, 2023’s Dead Reckoning and 2025’s The Final Reckoning , are ahead of their time. The films were written and filmed during the early 2020s, enduring multiple unprecedented hurdles and obstacles throughout their production, including COVID-related shutdowns and the SAG and WGA strikes. Many films that experienced significant multi-year delays due to these factors ended up feeling stilted or stale by their release, but with Mission: Impossible it was exactly the opposite. Despite being conceived and filmed in the years before Gen AI became a reality, 2023’s Dead Reckoning overtly addresses Tom Cruise and his crew squaring off against an all-knowing AI known as The Entity.
While Dead Reckoning was far from the first film in history to feature AI (it has been a staple of science-fiction storytelling for over a century), it’s notable how deeply entrenched in the real-world anxieties and fears surrounding AI the film is.
What could have easily felt like a slide into more fantastical territory for the franchise instead felt prescient and surprisingly anchored in the modern world. This became even more true with 2025’s The Final Reckoning, which saw The Entity earning its human acolytes willing to sacrifice core pillars of the human experience to further this AI dominance, and how it created personalised echo chambers for online internet users.
Through potent insights such as these, and the use of technology like cryptocurrency in the films, the Mission: Impossible franchise has remained on the cutting edge (especially when compared to other Hollywood blockbusters) of tech. But what makes this all the more fascinating is how the films are also so firmly rooted in traditional cinematic values.
The Early Cinema Roots of Mission: Impossible
On a solely surface level, it isn’t hard to draw comparisons between the Mission: Impossible franchise and other modern action films such as John Wick, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or even Fast & Furious. However, the actual content of the films is vastly different from many of those films, making the most apt comparison a far more unlikely group of films: the pioneering ‘Cinema of Attractions’ films of the early 1900s.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
In the earliest days of the cinematic medium, artists such as Georges Méliès, Alice Guy-Blaché, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin were actively pushing up against the boundaries of this new artistic form and redefining what a movie could be. They each did this in different ways, bringing artistic audacity and theatrically-based showmanship to the forefront in diversified fashion. Yet each of them tapped into the ‘Cinema of Sttractions’, striving to give audiences an experience they had never had before through their films. In this way, director Christopher McQuarrie and producer/star Tom Cruise have followed in the footsteps of these foundational artists with their Mission: Impossible films.
Final Thoughts
From the life-threatening stunts that Cruise performs across the course of each film to the jaw-dropping ways in which they are visually captured, the Mission: Impossible franchise has remained rooted in the foundations of the past while pushing toward a bold new cinematic future. With The Final Reckoning purportedly concluding the series, the franchise’s legacy will be one of thirty years’ worth of innovation.
Rolling Stone AU/NZ newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.
