For nearly 30 years, Tom Cruise portrayed Impossible Mission Force member Ethan Hunt on the big screen, choosing over and over to accept each new adventure to the delight of audiences around the globe. Even as the series hit some pitfalls, it rebounded with Brad Bird’s fourth entry, Ghost Protocol (2011), and then kept running with Christopher McQuarrie’s fifth entry, Rogue Nation (2015). Part of this is because the series reimagined itself as more action-based instead of intrigue but, for my money, it’s because Rogue Nation and beyond found a way to connect the seemingly isolated adventures through to the rousing sixth entry, Fallout (2018). Now, the tale is possibly complete as the latest release, The Final Reckoning, not only seeks to conclude the story begun in 2023’s Dead Reckoning (formerly including Part One in the title) but also the series as a whole. The eighth entry in the series is a mixed-bag as it leans far more serious than any previous entry while also working overtime to make sure the audience remembers everything that came before *while also* delivering the stunts that have blown away audiences for more than three decades. Now that Final Reckoning is becoming available on home video, audiences, should they choose to accept, can explore the making of the film from a variety of angles and perspectives, some self-guided, some not, as we say goodbye to the IMF team and Ethan Hunt … for now.
If you’re interested in learning about The Final Reckoning in a spoiler-free capacity, head over to EoM Founder Douglas Davidson’s initial theatrical release review.
Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2025 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
Two months after Ethan Hunt (Cruise) prevented Gabriel (Esai Morales) from obtaining both of the keys to sunken Russian submarine the Sevastopol, the entire world appears to be on the brink of destruction as the artificial intelligence known as The Entity has wormed its way into every corner of the globe via the internet. With its reach vast and influence hidden, Hunt and his team realize they have three days to get to the Sevastopol, find The Entity’s source code, and destroy it, but, as always, this will require a series of leaps of faith that would be impossible for anyone else, whereas, for the IMF, it’s just another problem to figure out. But with time running out, even the IMF learn that they have their limits.
L-R: Actor/producer Tom Cruise and actors Simon Pegg and Pom Klementieff on the set of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2025 Paramount Pictures.
The following home release review is based on a standard edition 4K UHD retail copy provided by Alliance Entertainment for Paramount Pictures. Additionally, if you’re coming to a home release review, one presumes that you’ve seen the film, so we’re going to cover the home release edition before getting into anything else.
The 4K UHD edition is a three-disc set that includes one 4K UHD disc with the feature film and various audio options, including three commentary tracks and isolated score. The first Blu-ray disc also only includes the feature film, commentary tracks, and isolated score, while the second Blu-ray includes the remaining bonus features. Comparing the iTunes accessible digital edition against the physical edition list of features, everything appears to be consistent and carried over, which should absolutely delight fans of the series who like to learn how the stunts and story elements were crafted through the production process.
Like with Dead Reckoning, the features are a mixture of standard featurettes, deep dives, and supplemental materials. For instance, there are five featurettes looking at the four major stunts (individually) of the film and one for the composed score. In total, these run just over 15 minutes and offer insights from the cast and crew throughout the production, though most coverage is on Cruise and McQuarrie. In the portions marked “Editorial Content,” there are three sections which can be viewed either with commentary from McQuarrie or without it: deleted scenes, shooting in Olifants River Canyon, and the Biplane transfer in the final confrontation between Ethan and Gabriel. Because there’s no dialogue otherwise, I recommend enjoying these first with the commentary tracks so you can learn how the narrative plotline with Marie (Mariela Garriga) was cut and the reasoning why; how the footage in Olifants looked computer-generated at first and how they tackled unexpected problems; and more. There are also four promo sequences totaling just over three minutes that show off how Cruise, McQuarrie, and the stunt team orchestrated the final stunt of the film, as well as a look at Cruise during the biplane sequence. These were likely posted online in the run-up to release and are, admittedly, exceptionally cool to be able to view on your own if for no other reason than it can be a great way to highlight just how much work goes into crafting insane stunts as smartly and cautiously as possible. (My typically highly-anxious son loved these.)
The final piece of the special features is the gallery section that holds four video image galleries (totaling nearly 14 minutes) with focuses on Cruise, McQuarrie, the collaboration of the team, and the supporting cast. Each of these are provided without dialogue and are intended to be enjoyed as merely a set of moving pictures. The first one, however, includes a rather lengthy biography of accomplishments for the purposes of informing audiences less familiar with Cruise’s work and providing an honorarium for the actor. Considering that this is the presumed final film in a series in which he’s risked his life countless times for our amusement, one understands why Paramount would want to include such material on the release.
The on-disc presentation of the 4K UHD edition is a bit of a mixed bag, frankly, that could be tied to the technical side of things more than the film itself. Despite there being no special features on the 4K UHD disc, the bitrate on the presentation is oddly low with it holding in a range of Mbps in the mid-50s with occasional dips up and down. Recent reviews note that films such as The Bad Guys 2 and Jurassic World Rebirth held in the mid-70s with bumps into the 80s and sometimes down, but holding in the 70s. Blu-rays have a max bitrate of 40 Mbps, which means that the 4K UHD presentation of Final Reckoning is only marginally better than the best Blu-ray. Before Alliance Entertainment took over home releases for Paramount Pictures, press releases would include technical information which informed on which kind of disc was used and which size, but that’s not available now. What can be confirmed is that the bitrate should be higher for a feature that is not sharing its disk space with bonus features. Additionally, and this is harder to confirm, while the HDR does provide great range of color that makes the house fire sequence both gritty and beautiful (likewise with the scene of the sled dogs with Grace (Hayley Atwell) heading toward Ethan’s location), the home edition seems strangely darker overall than the theatrical edition. There’s more shadow than light, which could be seen as a specific visual choice given the danger poised by The Entity, but, more often than not, despite the beauty in the shots, characters don’t appear as well lit and, as a result, are harder for the audience to read — when you have Angela Bassett as the President grappling with the moral implications of killing your own people in a simultaneous attack on the munitions of countries around the world in an effort to appear equally victimized, we want to see Bassett work. Too frequently, in a film that takes great pains for human emotion and exposition, we can’t see the actors as easily as we could in the theatrical edition.
Director Christopher McQuarrie and actor/producer Tom Cruise on the set of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2025 Paramount Pictures.
Thankfully, however, the audio track, even the 5.1 surround that the EoM HQ is set up for, has zero issues. No muss, no fuss, just all immersive sound, whether it’s the sound of crashing waves, explosions, bullets, or anything else that absolutely consumes the screen. With so much of the tension in the film being the marriage of visuals and sound, it’s wonderful that at least the auditory experience carries over without issue.
Upon rewatching The Final Reckoning, the issues that exist within it only intesify, instead of reduce. Dead Reckoning ends with the audience on high alert and Final Reckoning not only begins heavily cooled, but it takes about an hour to get revved up again. The urgency, the insistence, created in Dead is all but gone to give way to a much more passive and pensive energy. We’re meant to think that what’s transpired over the past two months is insurmountable, impossible even, and that makes sense, yet, as the direct continuation of one story to another, the hand-off is far less smooth. Consider the end of Ghost Protocol into Rogue Nation and the way that Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) makes himself known amid Ethan’s film-start mission-acceptance message — it sets tone and stakes with intensity. Here, however, the film is so intent on exploring the past that it forgets to spend time on the present translating to a mistrust of the audience to have watched the prior seven films (1), a removal of plotlines like Marie (2), the health crisis and then death of series mainstay Luther (Ving Rhames) (3), the absolute removal of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) who had only died two months prior (4), the ridiculous shoehorning of Briggs as Jim Phelps’s (Jon Voight) son (5), and a number of other items that result in a frustrating watch. It’s not about comparing what the film is to what it could be so much as it seems to want the victory lap of a final film more than finishing the story that it started. For instance, we didn’t need The Entity to be revealed as the Rabbit’s Foot from Mission: Impossible III (2006), but someone calling it the Anti-God (outside of the opening audio montage) would make any series-long fan joyful. We didn’t need for there to be a suggested love connection between Ethan and Grace, especially when the thread with Marie and Ilsa remains loose and untied. We didn’t need for Luther to die even if doing so raises the stakes, but having it be a Black character who dies in service of his white friend feels backwards and the inclusion of the health crisis seems like a bridge too far, even if, perhaps, to lessen the impact of his explosive demise (perhaps it was more immediate than whatever ails him, we don’t know — they don’t talk about it). All of this plus the repeated flashbacks just undermine the narrative tension by removing us from the present. There’s plenty of good in the film and I wrote about it before, such as the return of Mission: Impossible’s William Donloe (Rolf Saxon) and the juxtaposition of Ethan as the good version of The Syndicate. And the stunts! When they don’t feel like replications of ones done prior, man, do they dazzle.
L-R: Actor/producer Tom Cruise and filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie on the set of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2025 Paramount Pictures.
For now, the series is done. Ethan is on the streets somewhere and Benji (Simon Pegg) is now team leader, fulfilling that character’s arc from lab specialist to field operative. Would it be great to have the IMF back in theaters, saving the day against impossible challenges? Absolutely. But it’s also important to know when to say goodbye. Whether it means that Ethan becomes the next Phelps for a new team or, dare we say it, fills the vacant IMF Director’s chair, we need a new generation of spies and craftspeople to make the choice and answer the call. For now, Mr. Hunt, thank you for your service. For all of those you’ll never meet, please rest.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Special Features:
- Dolby Vision/HDR Presentation of the Film
- Dolby Atmos Audio Track
- Taking Flight: Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie take you through the biplanes stunt. Witness them push things to the next level to capture these incredible flight sequences. (5:50)
- To The Depths: Dive in with Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie to explore every detail of the water tank/moving gimbal, the special masks/water suits, and the rigorous planning and execution of this one-of-a-kind stunt. (Featurette – 3:18)
- To The North: Journey with the cast and crew to see how they filmed in extreme conditions to create the breathtaking sequence in the high Arctic of Svalbard. (Featurette – 3:37)
- Through the Mine: Explore the Middleton Mine as the team highlights the risks, challenges, and practical elements to pull off this incredible action sequence. (Featurette – 2:45)
- The Score: A behind-the-scenes look at the original music composed for the film. (Featurette – 1:36)
- Deleted Footage Montage with Optional Commentary by Director Christopher McQuarrie: Director Christopher McQuarrie shares some of the stunning, never-before-seen deleted shots that did not make the final film. (Editorial Content – 9:36)
- Olifants River Canyon with Optional Commentary by Director Christopher McQuarrie: Director Christopher McQuarrie details the difficulties of shooting the dangerous, low level flying sequence through the Olifants River Canyon in South Africa. (Editorial Content – 9:12)
- Biplane Transfer with Optional Commentary by Director Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise: Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie discuss the challenges of filming the highly technical and extremely dangerous biplane transfer stunt at high altitudes. (Editorial Content – 4:04)
- Commentary by Director Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise: Enjoy a compelling, in-depth discussion with Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise. (2:49:36)
- Commentary by Director Christopher McQuarrie, Editor Eddie Hamilton, and First Assistant Director Mary Boulding: Experience the film with riveting insights and analysis from these acclaimed filmmakers. (2:49:36)
- Commentary by Composers Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey, and Score Producer Cécile Tournesac: Hear from the artists who enhance the action with thrilling music. (2:49:36)
- Four (4) Promo Spots (3:25)
- Four (4) Still Galleries (13:47)
- Isolated Score Track (2:49:36)
Available on digital August 19th, 2025.
Available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K UHD Blu-ray steelbook October 14th, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Paramount Pictures Mission: Impossible website.
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Categories: Home Release, Recommendation
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