How ‘Mission: Impossible’ Became Hollywood’s Premier Dad Movie Franchise

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has been in theaters for nearly a month, and appears to be on course to more or less match its predecessors in box office gross. As much as Paramount would have liked The Final Reckoning to bloom into a billion-dollar global smash to mitigate the various COVID and strike-related delays that helped balloon the sequel’s budget, the Mission: Impossible movies have performed with clear consistency, at least in the domestic sphere: right around $200 million, give or take $25 million or so. Of course, inflation means that the first two entries (which made about the same as the last few) were seen by more people. But inflation also bumps up the somewhat lower-grossing Mission: Impossible III back into the same zone as the others. The point is, the series always does well, and rarely inspires the kind of frenzied mega-grosses that greet youth-driven phenomena like Independence Day, Barbie, or Minecraft, to name some same-year competition for various Missions. The reason for both its long-term success and the ceiling on that success seems increasingly clear: No matter how much Cruise may want to defy the aging process, and possibly death itself, with his stuntwork, these are Dad Movies, through and through.

They’re not always associated with the subgenre, given that Dad Movies tend to be described with a certain modesty, a certain lack of four-quadrant bombast – they’re defined in part by the meat-and-potatoes qualities that a lot of mega-movies have intentionally abandoned in the quest to get bigger. But as expensive as these MI movies are, the audience is clearly aging. After Top Gun: Maverick became one of the biggest movies ever in 2022, some (including myself) thought that it would propel the last two Mission movies ever higher, but the series’ Dad Movie bona fides kept those numbers more earthbound. Now, Top Gun: Maverick is a Dad Movie, too. But it’s also the sequel to a Gen-X touchstone that remains (however inexplicably, considering his filmography of classics) Tom Cruise’s most famous and beloved role. It expanded far beyond the base; nothing makes a billion and a half worldwide on dads alone. By contrast, the next year’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning did about the same as that summer’s Indiana Jones picture. They might have once been bigger tents, but these were series firmly in dad territory now.

It’s not necessarily a turn anyone would have predicted back when the first Mission: Impossible drew jeers from older fans of the TV series for one of its major twists: Making Jim Phelps, a stalwart character on the show and played by Jon Voight in the film, the villain of the piece. Brian De Palma’s movie also cheekily knocks off much of the team surrounding Ethan Hunt in the film’s dynamite opening sequence, forcing Ethan to assemble a smaller crew of “disavowed” figures (played by permanent fixture Ving Rhames and one-and-done Jean Reno). With Mission: Impossible II, this less team-based, more Cruise-focused approach seemed to be codified; Rhames returned, a utility guy named Billy Baird was listlessly added for some grunt work, and Cruise grew out his hair. This was not, as they say, your father’s Mission: Impossible, with more Dirty Harry-style lone-wolfing than Dirty Dozen-style teamwork.

But the series eventually circled back around to the idea of teams while retaining the convention that those teams would be mostly or entirely disavowed for fully half the entries, which appeals to the Dad Movie sensibility of flouting authority while still sticking to some well-organized chain of command. The Mission: Impossible movies are able to offer that, plus a James Bond-style comfort watch – and surprisingly, given that Bond movies used to arrive with clockwork regularity, Ethan Hunt has become the more reliable spy. Over the past decade, there have been four Christopher McQuarrie-directed Missions, and just two Bond movies; remarkably, the Mission series is purportedly ending, and yet still feels more active at the moment than Bond. Ethan Hunt started off as a sleek, streamlined, Cruise-y update on the Bond archetype; now he’s Bond reborn as a Christ figure.

McQuarrie may be the key; he eventually brought a kind of masculine solemnity to the series that better matches it to Dad Movie action classics than the more playful, mischievous energy of Brian De Palma or Brad Bird. If that has sometimes sent the movies into a Cruise-worshiping self-seriousness, it also lends them a snarkless sincerity that probably appeals to older audiences. The Final Reckoning reaches a Dad apex by circling around to offer a tacit apology for the Jim Phelps business, turning Dad Movie fixture Shea Whigham into a new, non-nefarious Phelps figure – he’s the son of the movie’s Phelps, you see – allowing him to share a moment of manly acknowledgment with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. A redemption through fatherhood! That doesn’t actually involve any on-screen parenting! (Very few Dad movies do, whether you want to chalk that up to escapism or avoidance.) What could be stereotypically Dadlier? This may not have been McQuarrie’s primary mission, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been accomplished. Whatever the future-dad version of TBS Bond marathons turns out to be, it may be playing Ethan Hunt on a loop instead.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.