Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning concludes with the good guys saving the day, and Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt getting his hands on the AI Entity that very brought the world to its knees.
The IMF team meets in Trafalgar Square, Grace gives Ethan the drive, and he walks off into the crowd, perhaps ready for his next mission or to take a well-earned break. Either way, the door is left open for another adventure, and if that doesn't happen, then it's a solid, open-ended way to conclude the character's story (he's out there somewhere...we just don't know where).
In an interview with USA Today (via ActioNewz.com), Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie explained, "What I love about the way it ends is the way it ends. We've always wanted to end a 'Mission' that way, but you can't make these movies do things they don't want to do. 'Mission' has a mind of its own."
There's no post-credits scene setting up a potential sequel, but we came very close to getting one, according to the filmmaker. However, while McQuarrie and Cruise were gearing up to shoot a stinger, that changed days before when the actor was shown the last 10 minutes of the movie.
"I came to Tom and I said, 'Look, normally I would want you to see the whole movie before I showed this to you, but we're about to shoot this coda in a couple of days and just look at this bit,'" McQuarrie recalled. "He said, 'You know what, you can cancel Saturday's work because this is the end of the movie. This is it.'"
Unfortunately, he declined to reveal what might have been. "I’m not going to say because it could end up in another movie," McQuarrie teased.
This would have been the first Mission: Impossible movie to include a post-credits scene. With so much uncertainty surrounding the franchise's future (Cruise has left Paramount Pictures to develop projects for Warner Bros.), it might have set up a movie that never comes to fruition.
In other news, Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima has weighed in with his glowing review of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning:
Went to see 'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' in IMAX. It begins with Tom greeting the audience and ends with a glance he throws our way. This wasn’t a film about Ethan Hunt saving the world from the threat of digital domination — it was a film about Tom Cruise, putting his life on the line in a desperate struggle to save cinema itself, which is slowly vanishing from the world. It was the movie of a man who lives and breathes film. I still want to see him keep making the impossible, possible. I hope this series continues. At 61, I’m proud to be a follower of Tom, who’s 62.
"Our lives are the sum of our choices. Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning," reads the brief synopsis for the movie.
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning stars Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Mariela Garriga, Henry Czerny, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Angela Bassett, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, and Frederick Schmidt.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is now playing in theaters.