Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

When did it become clear to you that Mission: Impossible was no ordinary franchise? For me, it was 2011. Up until then, Tom Cruise had starred in three installments, of which I had seen only the first, released fifteen years earlier. Though I liked that one, the 2000 John Woo-directed sequel had bad buzz around it. The 2006 threequel, which passed the helm over to J.J. Abrams fresh off of co-creating “Lost”, was better received, but its budget was up and its box office was significantly down. It seemed like the place where most high-profile action film series would call it a day. But Cruise returned in 2011, joined by some new on-camera talent. Directing duties had gone to animation titan Brad Bird. The fourth installment, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, drew the best reviews and the biggest grosses of the series to date.

Buy Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning from Amazon.com:
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code · 4K Ultra HD Combo Steelbook · DVD · Prime Video

The franchise was revived and the end would have to wait. Another fourteen years, at that. That’s right. The saga finally drew to a close this year with an eighth movie opening twenty-nine years (to the weekend) after the first. The longevity is unprecedented and in that regard, the consistently high-caliber, high-octane line dwarves the achievements of cinema’s other epic undertakings, from Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter to James Bond, Star Wars, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Whereas those landmark franchises underwent major resets and personnel changes or sustained an audience for only a few years (or a decade in Potter‘s case), Mission: Impossible simply stayed the course, pushed the envelope and remained relevant.

Tom Cruise’s reputation may have risen, fallen, and evolved, but he has always had enough star power to lead these movies. Those who were in their teens when Cruise started making these movies are now middle-aged. Cruise is well into his sixties. Those old enough to remember the 1960s-’70s TV series on which this franchise was based have long aged out of Hollywood’s primary demographics.

None of this should make any sense going off what we know about the lifespans of franchises, the drawing power of movie stars, the ever-changing nature of pop culture tastes, and the dramatic highs and lows unique to Cruise’s public image. But ultimately, people like entertaining and well-made movies and, with the exception of Mission: Impossible II, it is impossible to describe the series’ every installment as anything else.

The saga comes to a close with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, whose title got reworked after 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part One performed below commercial expectations. Film number eight picks up with the cliffhanger on which film number seven concluded. For the fourth straight time, Cruise’s valued screenwriter-turned-auteur Christopher McQuarrie writes and directs. For the third straight time, he also joins Cruise as producer.

We open with death-defying Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) deep in the throes of a battle against personal nemesis Gabriel (Esai Morales) and The Entity, artificial intelligence that has run wild and now threatens the world’s existence. When your main course is spectacle action, be it in superhero cinema or the more Bond-esque thrills of this franchise, it can be difficult to concoct a narrative with enough keep viewers’ brains engaged. But McQuarrie, Final Reckoning co-writer Erik Jendresen (HBO’s “Band of Brothers”), and Cruise, whose creative fingerprints are over what has long been accepted as his signature franchise, do a respectable job of giving the storytelling some relevance and intellect.

In the two years since Dead Reckoning opened, AI has only grown in stature, becoming catch-all shorthand for both fear (humanity’s inevitable obsolescence) and opportunity (effortless automation) alike. The film industry presently wrestles with the usefulness and efficiency of such technology, while also taking a public stance that looks out for the humans who might well be virtually replaced. Final Reckoning doesn’t delve deep into the subject, instead using it as a believable backdrop for one last set of highly improbable heroics, which as always Hunt carries out with some help from trusted colleagues, including tech experts Benji and Luther (Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames) and pickpocket turned confidante Grace (Hayley Atwell).

Running 170 minutes with credits, Final Reckoning sets a runtime record for the series and not to its benefit. Cruise’s legacy of inventive stunts has become rather, uh, impossible to top and nothing that he or McQuarrie come up with here quite matches the impact of the Burj Khalifa climb and plane dangle. The most ambitious set piece here may be an underwater expedition that outstays its welcome.

But while this finale flirts with excess and bloat, it never dips below the satisfying standard set by six of the seven previous outings. One of the better ideas we get here is the return of a minor character from the 1996 original film, which is so unexpected and kind of beautiful. The film does expect you to have watched/rewatched Brian De Palma’s franchise-launcher much more recently than I have, but those who have made it a point to revisit the line from time to time will likely appreciate the thoughtful callbacks and attempts to give Hunt’s endless saga some full-circle closure.

Even at its very best, the Mission: Impossible franchise has never quite reached the four-star class of cinema for me. I know 2018’s Fallout has its vocal supporters, as does Top Gun: Maverick, the 2022 reboot cinema savior whose astronomical box office success curiously failed to spill over to this kindred Cruise-McQuarrie collaboration. But the draw here has long been innovative action and stunts, fronts on which it has repeatedly dazzled, while my love of story and characters has never been fully engaged or satisfied. That is, unsurprisingly, the case once again and it keeps me from embracing this series as more than technically splendid visceral fun. Other tentpole sagas have unquestionably reached greater heights on their best installments — Jurassic Park, the first two Back to the Future movies, Skyfall, about half of the Star Wars movies. But Mission has stayed consistently good, not ever provoking outrage or even disappointment since M:I – 2 came so early.

The achievements of this franchise were easier to take for granted in the 1990s when it was being compared to a glut of thoughtful, compelling cinema (movies like The Fugitive, Se7en, Apollo 13, L.A. Confidential) and engaging mainstream diversions, like the Batman movies and then-fresh Jerry Bruckheimer productions. In 2025, the options have thinned out and there are few movies to which we might directly compare Final Reckoning, almost all of them the superhero movies except for F1. Amidst this lighter competition, Ethan Hunt’s send-off feels pretty special and hard not to take for granted. And yet, summer moviegoers still kind of did that, with the film currently ranking ninth for the year both domestically and worldwide. Foreign audiences accounted for two-thirds of the movie’s nearly $600 million global haul, which only sounds towering until you see the movie’s budget was $400 million and realize it has a long way to go before profitability.

With its theatrical performance mostly closed, Final Reckoning recently hit home video, with Paramount releasing it as a DVD, the three-disc 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code edition reviewed here, and as a Steelbook version of the latter.

4K ULTRA HD & BLU-RAY DISC SPECIFICATIONS:

Widescreen (Various Aspect Ratios)
Dolby Atmos TrueHD 7.1 (English), Dolby Digital 5.1 (Descriptive Video Service, Spanish Latin American, French, French Canadian, Isolated Score)
Subtitles: English, English for Hearing Impaired, Danish, Spanish Latin American, French, Québécois , Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish
Extras Subtitled in English, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Spain Spanish, Latin American Spanish, French, Québécois, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Hungarian, Mandarin, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Slovenian, Finnish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish
Release Date: October 14, 2025
Three single-sided discs (1 BD-100, 1 BD-50, 1 BD-25)
Black Keepcase in Cardboard Slipcover

VIDEO and AUDIO

Like many a modern film shot and constructed in part for large format moviegoing, Final Reckoning sees its aspect ratio change from time to time. (Thank you, Christopher Nolan.) I didn’t measure myself but online sources say the two ratios it most commonly employs are 2.39:1 and 1.90:1 and that does align with what my eyes saw. Needless to say, the feature presentation is an absolute feast, whether you’re watching in 4K or just 1080p. You don’t have a $400 million budget without making sure everything looks and sounds terrific and the film leaves nothing to be desired technically. The robust Dolby Atmos soundtrack especially makes for solid demo material.

BONUS FEATURES, MENUS, PACKAGING and DESIGN

The movie disc includes two audio commentaries, the first by Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise. The second commentary teams McQuarrie with editor Eddie Hamilton and first AD Mary Boulding for a more technical discussion.

We also get an isolated score track, an always-welcome novelty that has not been a common inclusion in decades.

All video-based supplements are relegated to the third disc of the set, the bonus features Blu-ray, which features a jaw-dropping 22 subtitle options.

The bonus disc begins with a Behind the Scenes section consisting of five short topical featurettes that together run 17 minutes and 3 seconds long. The pieces are “Taking Flight”, “To the Depths”, “To the North”, “Through the Mine”, and “The Score.” All of them direct your attention to the facets of production that you would expect with a wealth of good production B-roll and comments led by McQuarrie and Cruise.

Under the heading Editorial Content, we find three items.

A Deleted Footage Montage (9:35) is scored dialogue-free scraps whose inclusion would have brought the movie close to the three-hour mark. It can also be viewed with McQuarrie commentary, which makes sense of it.

“Olifants River Canyon” (9:11) supplies behind-the-scenes looks at an aerial chase sequence. It too gives you the option to watch it with dramatic score or illuminating McQuarrie commentary. This is the piece that really makes it sync in how wild making these movies has been.

“Biplane Transfer” (4:03) breaks down that big stunt from multiple angles. It can be viewed either just with score or with commentary by McQuarrie and Cruise.

Four promo spots (3:23) give us succinct servings of intense behind-the-scenes looks involving planes, parachutes, and skydiving.

The set draws to a close with Galleries, which is really a 13-minute, 51-second slideshow of photos with a few minutes of scrolling EPK-type text Tom Cruise biography in there for some reason. Cruise and McQuarrie get the lion’s share of the high quality publicity and behind-the-scenes photos found here, with supporting cast sharing the final minute.

Altogether, the bonus disc gives us about an hour of material, and more if you count the alternate score/commentary tracks twice.

On all three discs, the menu runs a well-edited loop of action stunts and thrills while the iconic theme plays.

The three plain discs share a standard black keepcase whose artwork (in which Cruise is dwarved by a yellow and black bi-plane) is repeated in a slipcover. An insert supplies the digital copy code promised.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Final Reckoning brings an historic chapter of action cinema to a close after thirty years of dependable entertainment. Tom Cruise and his collaborators have given the world so much ambitious and thrilling work for so long without any discernible drop-off in quality, an achievement so epic it’s tough to fully comprehend and appreciate right now.

When this franchise began, DVD had not yet been introduced. At its end, 4K Ultra HD is physical media’s gold standard in an age dominated by streaming. If you like these movies enough to want to own them, I’m certain a complete 4K collection will be here before long. But if you’re committed to adding them one by one, this comprehensive set warrants a strong recommendation.

Buy Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning from Amazon.com:
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code · 4K Ultra HD Combo Steelbook · DVD · Prime Video

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