Mission: Impossible's Place in Pop Culture in 2023--and What it Means for the Series' Fortunes

At this point it has been over a quarter of a century since the first big-screen Mission: Impossible hit theaters (back in 1996). At the time the film was a characteristically '90s exercise in nostalgia--like The Addams Family and The Fugitive and The Flintstones milking the public's hazy recollections of '60s TV to sell tickets, largely to young people who had never seen the original, and probably would not have liked the old thing much if they had--or liked the new thing if they had liked the old.* (Greg Morris, who played Barney Collier on the original show during its seven year run, walked out of a viewing of the 1996 movie and called it an "abomination"--understandably, I think, given what the film did to the original cast of characters.) Indeed, it seems to say something of the slightness of the connection of the film with the show that the movie "borrowed" its most famous scene not from the show but from the entirely unrelated Topkapi (though according to the story I read, at least, Mr. Morris did not stick around long enough to catch that).**

Now the movie franchise has been around for so long that any nostalgia for the original show is long gone--and the movie series putting out new films on the basis of audience familiarity not with the show but with the earlier movies as it endlessly repeats the same tired clichés. (Thus does the Impossible Mission Force become convinced Ethan Hunt is a traitor and forced him to go on the run to stop the bad guys and clear his name in a repeat of the premise of John Buchan's century-old The Thirty-Nine Steps over and over and over again.)

For twenty-seven years.

Considering the span of time that passed between the release of the first Mission: Impossible film and 2023's Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning: Part One I find myself thinking of the twenty-year seven passage between two films in another iconic '60s-era spy-themed action-adventure series, the one that did so much to create the fashion in which Mission: Impossible became a hit--the EON-produced James Bond movies. Twenty-seven years after the James Bond film series' debut we got Licence to Kill in the summer of 1989--in many respects a low point for the series, from the standpoint of commercial cachet, and even its own identity. (The series' runners had coped with declining interest in Bond for decades through frenzied trend-chasing, and the 1989 movie ended up looking more like a big-but-generic '80s drug-dealers-killed-my-favorite-second-cousin thriller than a Bond movie.)

Of course, the latest film in the Mission: Impossible series seems to enjoy more regard from both critics and audiences than Licence to Kill did to go by its Rotten Tomatoes score. Still, that audience is a long way from what it had been at the franchise's start, when the first two movies were, in 2023 dollars, $350 million+ hits in the North American market. Mission: Impossible III, which came out a long six years after the second film, suffered horribly because of the stupid furor over Tom Cruise's stupid couch-jumping, and if the series recovered partially five years later, its draw in America has just never been the same--and its continuation ever more dependent on its foreign grosses, without the burgeoning of which, in large part because of a strong reception in China, it would have ceased to be commercially worthwhile long ago. Now with even the foreign grosses faltering alongside the American (again, I doubt the movie will approach the $200 million mark domestically, leaving it the new low for the series), I doubt that even the most franchise-addicted of the Hollywood Suits will rush to greenlight a continuation. Part Two of Dead Reckoning will still come out of course--but barring a miracle the financial disappointment (and very likely, loss) seems likely to mean that Mission: Impossible 9 will not be coming soon to any theater near you.

But there will probably eventually be a "reboot," because these days there always is, assuming Hollywood-as-we-know-it endures for a few years past next summer.

* Notably this was not the first attempt to cash in on the franchise, ABC airing a revival that ran for 35 episodes over two seasons in October 1988-February 1990.
** This is, of course, the famous heist sequence, taken from the earlier 1964 film, which was an adaptation of Eric Ambler's classic thriller The Light of Day--which I suspect just about everyone these days was invented for the film, just as few realize the bit with the baby carriage in Brian de Palma's prior TV-show-turned-film The Untouchables was swiped from Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin.