Can Tom Cruise get audiences to care about Mission: Impossible 8?

The underwhelming box office of the seventh instalment has now been followed by a year-long delay for the next chapter

Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1 which had production shut down twice due to covid. Photo: Christian Black/Paramount Pictures.

Since 1996, the Mission: Impossible franchise has put Tom Cruise through the wringer. 

He’s scaled skyscrapers. He’s leapt out of planes. He’s broken bones. He did whatever the hell it was that Mission: Impossible II was about. And yet, despite this pathological desire to risk life and limb in the pursuit of mass entertainment, it’s starting to look like Cruise’s most difficult job yet will be to get anyone to see Mission: Impossible 8.