Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to watch every Mission: Impossible film you can. The latest, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, hits digital services on October 10 and DVD, Blu-ray, and UHD physical media on Halloween, after a summer run in theaters earlier this year. The question is how to do that: All the other films are streaming on Paramount+, yes, but did you know you can watch most of them for free, too? Or at least without coughing up for another subscription service? Why pay more to watch Tom Cruise nearly get stabbed in the eye when you can do it for free? We’re happy to point you in the right direction.
The Films
Mission: Impossible
The Mission: Impossible movie franchise got its start as a Brian De Palma–directed action vehicle for Tom Cruise — a twisty, suspenseful, and betrayal-laced thriller that burnished his reputation for physicality. Plenty of fans still consider Ethan Hunt’s first outing the best of the films, but somewhat infamously, the cast of the TV show hated its action and how it treated the franchise’s characters: “It was basically an action-adventure movie and not Mission,” said original cast member Martin Landau. “The ideal mission was getting in and getting out without anyone ever knowing we were there.” With all respect to Landau, its success and unadulterated spy-fi fun serve as arguments against faithfulness.
Mission: Impossible 2
The great John Woo of Hard Boiled and Face/Off fame directed this film, the franchise’s first and biggest misfire. Woo recently told Vulture that in all of his films, for “every actor, I try to find a different angle or some special lighting to make them look great,” and that’s true here, but stylized imagery alone doesn’t make a movie. Mission: Impossible 2 is often a beautiful mess, but the films’ overall quality only went up from here.
Mission: Impossible 3
The third Mission movie has some clunky lines (“He’s a goddamn invisible man — Wells, not Ellison, in case you wanna be cute again”) and an even worse publicity campaign (coinciding with Tom Cruise’s ties to Scientology entering the South Park crosshairs), but it gave the franchise a major critical hit after its second film outing. In this one, Ethan comes out of active-duty retirement to face off against an arms dealer played by the scene-devouring Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol
This was the one that changed it all — the one where Tom scaled the tallest building in the world on-camera, the one where he brought an uncredited Christopher McQuarrie into the fold, and (perhaps most importantly) the one that added an emphatic dash to its title. Those ingredients and an exploding Kremlin made this the Mission that set the mold for the rest to follow, each of them films that rely on at least one major showstopping stunt, McQuarrie’s direction, and increasingly batshit punctuation.
Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation
Rogue Nation set up what these films sorely lacked up until this point: a recurring villain in the shadowy Syndicate that could serve as a viable foil to Ethan Hunt’s IMF, the SPECTRE to his MI6. It’s also peppered with rhymes and callbacks to the very first Mission film: Its central MacGuffin is a list of Syndicate operatives, instead of a list of IMF agents, and rather than ride on top of a train for the big stunt, Cruise dangled from the side a military transport plane as it took off. Honestly, we’d prefer that to nearly drowning, which he also did for this movie. Worth it.
Mission: Impossible — Fallout
Maybe it’s called Fallout because this one’s lousy with plutonium cores, recaptured nuclear bombs, tense disarming sequences, and explosions. But we know it’s actually called Fallout because this is the one where Tom falls out of a plane. Whatever the reason, Fallout rules. It’s beloved for its bathroom fight starring Henry Cavill’s reloading fists and because of how increasingly improbable it’s become for Cruise — then in his 50s, now in his 60s — to continue “bleeding for us,” as critic Bilge Ebiri put it last year. (He broke an ankle filming an “easy” stunt for this one.) But it also trades on the years we’ve spent following not just Cruise but his castmates like Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Michelle Monaghan. In the ’96 film, Hunt’s teammates were unceremoniously killed, and each film has gradually replaced them with loved ones and allies. Fallout forces him to choose between them and nuclear holocaust.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
We’re not yet entirely sure what the seventh Mission: Impossible movie has in store for us, but so far it looks really good. From the trailers and information that’s trickled out, it seems to call back to earlier entries more than the series ever has, from a long dolly shot of Cruise running his legs off (like he did in Mission 3) to another fight scene staged atop a train (Mission: Impossible). He fights AI in this one, a fitting nemesis for Hollywood’s most physical actor.
The TV Series
Mission: Impossible
The show that started it all debuted in 1966, when Tom Cruise was a 4-year-old. Landau was right: The films and the TV show (both its ’60s incarnation and its 1988 revival, which isn’t streaming) are different beasts. The show never had the budget or the appetite for the movies’ action set pieces, but instead focused on the spies’ tradecraft and planning as they targeted Cold War–era dictators, mobsters, and Nazi revivalists. Its core cast included Landau, Barbara Bain, Peter Graves, Greg Morris, Peter Lupus, and, for two seasons, Leonard Nimoy, along with several rotating guest stars as agents. The show did, however, introduce the series’ most iconic gag.
