In Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, the unstoppable force that is Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) faces the immovable, inevitable Entity, a rogue AI with the power to rewrite reality itself. Their conflict has been brewing since 2023’s Dead Reckoning, the first half of what could be Ethan’s last stand. The Entity has been studying Ethan: it knows exactly which buttons to press to ensure that he fails his mission, paving the way for a new world order. As we learn in Final Reckoning, however, this showdown has actually been in the works for much longer. Everything Ethan has ever done in his 30-year tenure with the Impossible Mission Force has led to this — in fact, his past efforts to save the world might have inadvertently brought the Entity online.
Even if this isn’t the last we see of Ethan Hunt, Mission: Impossible is doing its best to wrap up its eight-film franchise in as neat a bow as possible. That consolidating makes for a handful of callbacks and retcons, the most interesting of which brings us back nearly 20 years to Mission: Impossible III. A huge chunk of Final Reckoning hinges on Ethan’s misadventures in the 2006 film, and the recovery of the “Rabbit’s Foot,” a MacGuffin that’s much more important in hindsight.
