Can Tom Cruise survive without Ethan Hunt? No, our favorite unkillable, rogue IMF agent and living manifestation of destiny doesn’t die in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, but the unsettled feeling we get throughout the picture regarding his fate isn’t entirely unwarranted. It has been strongly implied (certainly in the marketing, not to mention the movie itself) that this will be the last installment of the series. “It is called The Final Reckoning,” Cruise, now 62, has said, and he has repeatedly referred to the film as a “culmination” of a series he began nearly 30 years ago. He’s being coy, but he does seem to be done with these movies. Even the glimpses of prior adventures over the film’s montage-laden first hour feel like a death dream, like a franchise’s life flashing before its eyes. So maybe Ethan survives, but Mission: Impossible might well be over. Which all prompts the question Where the hell does Tom Cruise go from here?

Back in the mid-aughts, Mission: Impossible pictures kept Cruise’s career going even as his public image imploded with a variety of viral incidents that lost him a large chunk of his audience. With Hollywood already moving toward an all-franchises-all-the-time philosophy, Cruise’s sole movie series became his lifeline. Knight and Day and Valkyrie underperforming? No worries, there’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol to save the day. Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow not quite living up to expectations? Here comes Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation. The Mummy and American Made getting ignored? Never fear, Mission: Impossible — Fallout will fix things. In some ways, Cruise was simply doing what all stars do: interspersing riskier material with the surefire hits. But because he was Tom Cruise, the stakes felt greater.

Even back then, though, his field of play seemed to be gradually narrowing. Some of those aforementioned riskier projects were themselves hoping to be action franchises. The Mummy was an abortive attempt to kick-start Universal’s “Dark Universe” series of shared-universe monster movies. Cruise played Jack Reacher in two movies before giving it up. (The first was pretty good, and the second was lousy; neither was a hit.) Edge of Tomorrow, beloved by critics but a box-office disappointment, may still get a sequel. In the past decade-plus, the only genuinely original non-action picture on Cruise’s résumé is the underseen American Made, a wonderfully cynical drama about a pilot caught up in the CIA’s illegal drug- and gun-running operations into Latin America in the 1980s that sometimes plays like a gritty through-the-looking-glass riff on Top Gun. To be fair, the failure of some of these efforts was unfortunate: American Made and Edge of Tomorrow both feature Cruise at his best, deploying that All-American charisma of his and his range to portray multidimensional, fascinating characters.

For the past six years, however, Cruise has made only Mission: Impossible movies and Top Gun: Maverick. Some of that can be ascribed to the COVID-era delays of the incredibly complicated and seemingly endless productions of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning, which were planned as two interlocking movies and which began filming before the pandemic. He has said he’s moving forward with a third Top Gun film, and that series could conceivably take the place of Mission: Impossible. So maybe the plan is to keep playing largely in the franchise pool, making familiar action blockbusters for as long as he can.

There are also signs that things may be changing again. Cruise has talked about making a Les Grossman film, a spinoff of the foulmouthed and psychotic studio executive he played under loads of makeup in Tropic Thunder. We’ll see if that one happens; it would be hilarious if it does. He is also currently making a studio comedy with Birdman and The Revenant director Alejandro González Iñárritu. The rumored premise (per IMDb, so take it with a grain of salt) is promising: “The most powerful man in the world causes a disaster and embarks on a mission to prove that he is the savior of humanity.” It could be a great opportunity for the actor to exercise his underused comedy skills while leaning into the more sinister side of his persona, which proved so effective in movies like Collateral and Magnolia. Tom Cruise doing a movie — a comedy? — about megalomania? Sign us up.

Say what you want about Iñárritu — we critics are notoriously divided on him — but working with a two-time Oscar winner seems like a move the old Cruise would have made. After he achieved stardom in the mid-1980s, the actor consciously sought to work with respected filmmakers, from Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick to Michael Mann and the Scott brothers. He also exercised a startling degree of quality control over his material, often shaping his characters to reflect his onscreen persona and thematic obsessions (a process he reportedly started on the first Top Gun, which turned him into a megastar). Tom Cruise films during this era weren’t just hits — they were good movies: Rain Man, The Color of Money, Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men, Jerry Maguire, Collateral. While the acting Oscar that he once seemed so destined for has eluded him (he really should have won it for Magnolia), Cruise was for many years among the last remaining stars willing to take chances on big original movies.

As we all know, Cruise does a lot of running onscreen; usually, he’s running toward something. Sometimes, especially for the past decade, it seems as if he’s doing a lot of running offscreen, too, only in this case he’s running away from something. In recent years, he has opted to work largely with directors he’d collaborated with before: Christopher McQuarrie, Joseph Kosinski, Doug Liman, Edward Zwick. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it can feel as though he’s playing things extra carefully. Maybe he’s still wary from the bruising he took in the public eye back in the aughts, back when YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook were new and the great maw of the newborn social-media beast needed feeding. Which is why I’ve always wondered if, subconsciously, the stunts were a form of penance or avoidance. You can’t really criticize a guy for his personal life when he’s jumping a motorcycle into the vast emptiness of a Norwegian canyon. Ask him all you want about Scientology; he can’t hear you amid the churning engines of the prop plane he’s hanging from. Oh, and if he dies, won’t you feel like a huge jagoff?

It’s worked. Where once the internet loved to speculate endlessly about this secretive star’s supposedly complicated family life, we now accept him as a movie- and stunt-obsessed workaholic, a guy who spends all his time making movies, preparing for movies, premiering movies, thinking about movies, and supporting others’ movies: “the President of Movies.” Theater employees share videos of him chatting up the staff, casually answering questions. The strangest thing about him nowadays appears to be the deranged way he eats his popcorn. That’s what publicists call a win.

The Tom Cruise of 2025 is not the Tom Cruise of 2015, or of 2005, and the world’s perception of him has changed dramatically. I think maybe Cruise’s own perception of himself has changed as well. When he leaped off the Stade de France at the Paris Olympics closing ceremony last year, even he seemed surprised by the outpouring of love he received on the field from the world’s biggest athletes. It all felt so genuine, to the extent that anything a megastar does in front of a gauntlet of cameras for the benefit of millions of TV viewers can be called genuine. It was almost as if he were being welcomed back into everyone’s good graces.

So maybe he can stop running. Maybe he can feel free to branch out again, to take risks, to lend his star power to marginal projects that could then reward him with a great role. (I would love to see him do another musical again. Rock of Ages sucked, but he was fantastic in it.) We often call him “the last movie star.” That’s not really true; we’ve still got a few, and maybe names like Timothée Chalamet and Margot Robbie and Michael B. Jordan will achieve the kind of lasting power he has. But Cruise has seemed for many years like the last vestige of a particular era, when star-driven studio comedies and dramas ruled Hollywood and gave us classics that many of us, frankly, took for granted. Those types of films have been on life support for some years now. They could use a savior.

Related

• Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning Is a Huge Mess. But It’s a Fun Mess.
• Tom Cruise’s Last Stand
• Did Tom Cruise Kill the Internet in the New Mission: Impossible or What?

 Mission: Impossible might be over. What the actor does next could have enormous consequences — for him and for Hollywood.