Does Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt Die In Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning?

Spoilers follow.

The marketing campaign for "Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning" has not shied away from emphasizing the longevity of the eight-film franchise, along with a potential sense of ... well, finality. (You can read our review here.) The subtitle aside (though it came as an update, seeing as its 2023 predecessor was originally titled "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One"), the advertising has reminded us of some of the most notable setpieces in the life and times of IMF Agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), all while heavily implying that his mission to take down the villainous AI known as the Entity may just be his last mission. On one hand, it may be hard to envision Cruise not playing Ethan Hunt, considering that it's his most long-lasting character and emblematic of the type of stunt-based risks he's been taking for decades. If Tom Cruise is not Ethan Hunt anymore, then who is he, really? But the flip side is that, hard as it may to be believe, Cruise is past the age of 60, and there comes a point where he may be too old to keep donning the role (and any related masks) of Ethan Hunt.

So the simple question, one that audiences may have been wondering about for months in advance of this new film's release, is this: does Ethan Hunt die by the end of his "Final Reckoning"? With some of the (very lengthy) film's big-deal stunts focusing on Ethan swimming hundreds of feet deep past the surface of the ocean as well as hanging off a fast-moving biplane, it's a little easier than it used to be to imagine the IMF hero actually biting the big one. And yet, the answer to "Does Ethan die?" is an emphatic no. Though Ethan Hunt comes close to shuffling off this mortal coil, he does survive the events of this latest entry, allowing for the possibility that we'll get a ninth "Mission: Impossible," while raising another as-yet-unanswered question: where can they possibly go from here?

While it is true that Ethan Hunt survives the events of the eighth "Mission: Impossible," it's not for lack of putting himself in harm's way. As in the previous film, Ethan's key mission in this entry is to face off against and hopefully destroy the Entity, an enigmatic and seemingly all-powerful AI that is in the process of controlling the nuclear arsenal of all major countries in the world. There is, as usual, a ticking clock; Ethan has three days to stop the Entity before the President of the United States (Angela Bassett, reprising her role from "Mission: Impossible – Fallout") threatens to fire a pre-emptive strike against other countries in the hopes of deterring the Entity further. And there are, as usual, death-defying stunts that Ethan has to perform to help achieve his mission. Although the marketing has leaned heavily on the biplane sequence that serves as a chunk of the film's climax, the most dangerous stunt seems to appear at the midpoint, as Ethan goes hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean to retrieve the Entity's source code, buried deep in a long-defunct Russian submarine. That extended sequence, taking place in relative silence, pushes Ethan to the brink to the point where he has to be revived at length by pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell).

But there, and at the end after Ethan has successfully linked the Entity to a "poison pill" that will help destroy its internal mechanism, Ethan manages to avoid the specter of death. It's arguably not the first time we, as an audience, have been made to wonder if this is Ethan Hunt's last impossible mission. He's been revived from the brink of death in "Mission: Impossible III," and he's only just barely averted nuclear apocalypse in the aforementioned 2018 entry, "Mission: Impossible – Fallout." (On a smaller scale, he did the same at the end of "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol," where a well-timed disarming of a nuclear bomb avoided catastrophe in San Francisco.) And yet, Ethan keeps kicking, often with a slightly reconfigured version of his IMF team. In that respect, this "Final" film is no different, with Ethan last glimpsed in London, giving weighty nods to Benji (Simon Pegg), Grace, Paris (Pom Klementieff), and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis). If there's a ninth film, these would no doubt be his counterparts on whatever comes next.

But what can come next for Ethan Hunt, that hasn't been seen before? No doubt the stunts in this movie are insane and awe-inspiring and terrifying, in equal measure. But this movie, perhaps fittingly like the Entity itself, seems self-aware enough to not only reference earlier films deliberately through dialogue and plot, but through those stunts. (There have been so many dangerous stunts in the franchise that we've ranked them here.) Ethan having to do something incredibly insane underwater happened quite memorably in the mid-film action sequence in "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation," and "Mission: Impossible – Fallout" climaxes with a crazy action sequence in which Ethan climbs up one helicopter to chase down the main bad guy, who's flying another chopper. The stunts here do not feel like lazy retreads, but the similarities are impossible (natch) to ignore. Ethan Hunt may not die here, but maybe this should be the end of the "Mission: Impossible" series.

Familiar or not, the stuntwork in "Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning" is plenty impressive, and no doubt took a long time to come together. There's always the possibility that Tom Cruise and his collaborator Christopher McQuarrie can come up with something new and wild that feels fresh even if somewhat recognizable for a ninth film. And if Cruise's fellow elder statesman of action, Keanu Reeves, can be potentially brought back for a fifth "John Wick" film after his character sure seemed to bite the big one, then there's no stopping him. The question, as is often the case in Hollywood, isn't whether there could be another entry in a recognizable and largely successful piece of intellectual property, but if there should.

Cruise found massive success, beyond most people's belief, with "Top Gun: Maverick" in the summer of 2022, and part of the reason seems obvious: audiences hadn't visited the world of Maverick for decades, making them all the more excited to experience something on the big screen so soon after the COVID-19 pandemic had diminished enough for public gatherings. Though there are often a few years between "Mission: Impossible" entries, there's no shame in going out on a high. Although the film as a whole is not perfect, it ends very strong, and there would be something even more effective about the final images if we knew we weren't going to go back to the world of the IMF, that Ethan Hunt is always out there to protect those he may never meet, but that we don't have to keep finding out the latest ways in which he's putting his literal body on the line. Ethan Hunt lives through this movie, but the most impossible mission of all may be if Tom Cruise can let him stay there without revisiting him one last time.