Mission: Impossible 8's Delay and What it Means for the Franchise

It was reported this week that Mission: Impossible 8 has been bumped a whole year, from the summer of 2024 to the summer of 2025 due to the interruption of production by the recent strikes.

This is, of course, bad news for the franchise. The interruption and delay, after all, will doubtless raise the doubtless already colossal expenditure on the movie higher still, while making still more unwise the gamble on the movie--not just shooting it before 7 was even out, but making of the two movies a "two-part event." Hollywood has not been unknown to win, and even win big, with such strokes--as with Avengers 3 and 4. However, that was a matter of an unprecedentedly popular franchise at the absolute peak of its success playing this game. The same cannot be said of Mission: Impossible, which is far past its turn-of-the-century peak, with the last film a massive underperformer (instead of the near-billion-dollar hit many expected it failed to break $600 million), and indeed a series low in real terms (worse than 2006's Mission: Impossible III, when the coprophages of the entertainment media went from unhingedly idolizing Tom Cruise to the extreme opposite because he jumped on a couch). The result is that the audience's more usual, annoyed, reaction to getting "one film for the price of two" was already more likely to come into play--such as was seen with the last two Hunger Games films, and the last film taking in $100 million less than its predecessor. In the case of Mission: Impossible 8 this is likely to be exacerbated by an extra year's delay, which especially in these times seems more likely to make audiences lose interest, or even forget, than make them hunger for more.

Mission: Impossible 8 merely matching what Mission: Impossible 7 grossed at the box office would probably have been disappointing enough given its prior budgeting. With its likely increased cost, and the likelihood of the movie making even less than Mission: Impossible 7 did, the gap between outlay and revenue would be worse--a perhaps $300 million+ film grossing less than $500 million at the global box office, translating to another hole in the books that its studio does not need, all as worse still is not out of the question with so many franchises seeing not just erosion, but Flash-like collapse as Hollywood's royalty, endlessly flattered by their courtiers and claqueurs in the entertainment press and elsewhere, keep feeding the public sequels for which it never asked--and for which it refuses to pay.