Some time ago, I met a development exec at Disney who matter-of-factly explained the company’s approach to making entertainment. The type of consumer they target is the “Disney mom”: a typical middle-class American parent who decides which movies her family sees, plans the trips they go on, and buys things for the kids. She doesn’t have to be abnormally fond of Disney; the brand is so strong that her faith in it is simply assumed. The Disney mom will spend hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars each year on the company’s offerings. Only a small fraction of that will go to movie tickets, but the movies are crucial — they’re the gateway to the stuff that brings in the real money. Toy Story 3 made $1 billion at the box office, but it generated $10 billion in merchandise sales. A Disney film is, in effect, a big-budget advertisement for the company’s toys, clothes, theme parks, and cruises.
For a while, Disney was a special case of an entity whose movie studio is an appendage to another larger, more profitable business. The merchandisability of big movies has mattered since Star Wars, but to most studios, consumer products have always been an ancillary revenue stream — the main business purpose of a movie was simply to make money from people wanting to watch it.
Streaming has changed this. Instead of pocketing one-time profits from individual films and shows, studios with streaming services now earn recurring revenue from an amorphous blob of everything they’ve ever made. Hollywood has been introduced to the once-foreign concept of user churn. And the purpose of a theatrical film is now, in part, to keep subscribers coming back to Peacock, HBO Max, or Paramount+.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning makes a number of fascinating creative choices, such as devoting a major subplot to the U.S. president and her staff acting out a Basic English remake of Fail-Safe, and having all the crew members of a nuclear submarine talk in Eyes Wide Shut voice. But its most striking feature — to many, its biggest flaw — is its anime-level recapping of events that have occurred across the previous seven films. The movie goes all-out in tying itself to the other entries in the franchise. (The lone exception is John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2, a film that I sort of love for personal reasons but that Tom Cruise and company understandably appear to regard as non-canon.)
Until Mission: Impossible - Fallout — the sixth installment in the series, and the second directed by Christopher McQuarrie — these movies had little connection to each other. McQuarrie’s entries have had more of a continuous storyline, and starting with 2023’s Dead Reckoning, he began the process of linking the narrative to Ethan Hunt’s nebulous origins and to the 1996 film that launched the franchise. This was initially handled with a relatively light touch — the main bit of connective tissue was the welcome return of Henry Czerny as onetime Ethan Hunt handler, now CIA director Eugene Kittridge. Dead Reckoning seemed more concerned with setting up the Hunt origin story: the movie introduced a somewhat puzzling piece of retroactive mythology where all IMF agents are former criminals who were offered a choice between going to prison or doing cool missions for the U.S. government. Ethan’s supposed crime was the killing of one of the many dark-haired women he’s fallen for in his time on Earth. He was framed for the murder by the mysterious Gabriel, a terrorist who’s resurfaced as the emissary of a godlike artificial superintelligence.
Dead Reckoning’s repeated references to Ethan’s ambiguous history with Gabriel promised some kind of explanation in the next movie. The fact that it never comes is one of the funnier things about The Final Reckoning. The main antagonist of this two-part franchise capstone remains a complete cipher with no backstory or identifiable traits. However, we get an extensive subplot involving a CIA computer administrator from the 1996 movie, and we also learn that the rogue AI originates from the meta-MacGuffin “Rabbit’s Foot” Ethan was tasked with stealing in Mission: Impossible III. Oh, and the government agent who’s been pursuing Ethan is actually the son of the doublecrossing Jon Voight character he blew up inside the Chunnel twenty-nine years ago. The movie shows signs of extensive post-production tinkering and reshoots; despite the four hundred million dollar budget, much of the exposition-heavy first hour takes place in undifferentiated tunnels and dark rooms.
So, why is it that the character-defining mystery set up in part one was seemingly jettisoned in favor of connecting the story to the previous movies in every conceivable way? It’s possible that it was purely a creative decision — maybe McQuarrie just felt the movie worked better like this, or Cruise wanted to ensure it served as a suitable swan song if he doesn’t come back for the next one. But it’s hard to ignore that The Final Reckoning’s insistent hammering of franchise history aligns perfectly with the business needs of the studio that made it.
In 2024, Paramount earned $1.2 billion at the box office and $5.9 billion from its streaming services. IP-wise, the studio is underpowered — its most valuable properties are Star Trek, Transformers, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Mission: Impossible. If the company wants to survive, it has to squeeze those assets for everything they’ve got. Despite positive reviews and high audience scores, Dead Reckoning failed to turn a profit in its theatrical run, partly due to the misfortune of being released one week before the Barbenheimer phenomenon. It would be perfectly logical for Paramount to try to mitigate further losses by having The Final Reckoning serve a dual purpose: if the film can’t earn back its budget through ticket sales, it can at least help shore up subscriber numbers by reminding audiences of all the other movies they can stream on Paramount+.
The movie’s aggressive looping-back to the past is reminiscent of another supposedly final entry in a long-running franchise. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker gave us some of the most comical backpedaling in movie history with its reveal that Emperor Palpatine, the villain of the first six Star Wars films who died from getting yeeted into a conveniently-placed power reactor by a redeemed Darth Vader, was in fact still around, and the sequel trilogy’s hero Rey — already confirmed to have been born to a pair of “nobodies” — was his granddaughter. The undead Sith lord dramatically announces his presence via an audio message broadcast throughout the galaxy. This important piece of narrative, referenced in the first lines of The Rise of Skywalker’s opening crawl, occurred not in any of the movies, but in a live event held in the video game Fortnite Battle Royale.
To any normal observer, these are difficult decisions to understand, and they’ve justifiably become punchlines. But to the overseers at Disney and Lucasfilm — who, the film’s co-writer Chris Terrio has said, were the ones who mandated Palpatine’s inclusion — there was eminent logic in more tightly yoking the sequel trilogy to the rest of the franchise. Disney’s streaming service was set to launch in the same fiscal quarter as The Rise of Skywalker’s release. It was good for business to market the nine-episode series as a unified saga, and to motivate audiences — in particular, the cohort of kids who’d been introduced to Star Wars by the new movies — to go back and watch episodes one through six.
Again, it’s possible all of these choices were made for creative reasons, though this would make them a little more perplexing. But the commercial incentives for library reinforcement are obvious, and they align with broader, long-standing pressures to mine nostalgia and known IP. Franchise lore used to be seen as a liability — studios wanted to make sure sequels were maximally accessible to newcomers. With the inverted economics of streaming and the rise of online fandoms for every kind of fictional universe, the lore may start to become the point. By its nature, franchise filmmaking is an arena that favors the familiar; trying to take an established series somewhere surprising has always meant fighting its own history. Now there’s a fresh dimension to the battle: the need to not only respect that history, but to prop up its value. The library matters more than the new chapter. Somehow, the past always returns.