Tom Cruise puts man over mission in the Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One trailer

The new trailer for Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One is here, and it contains one big tease. The newly returned Kittridge (Henry Czerny) tells Tom Cruise’s character, “Ethan, this mission of yours…” Say the thing! Say the thing! We chant from home. “…Is gonna cost you.” Well, maybe it would be silly for the former director of the Impossible Missions Force to toss the i-word around, but this trailer does suggest Ethan will have to make an impossible choice: between his duty and his team.

“In Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team embark on their most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands,” reads the film’s synopsis. “With control of the future and the fate of the world at stake, and dark forces from Ethan’s past closing in, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan is forced to consider that nothing can matter more than his mission—not even the lives of those he cares about most.”

No matter how much Ethan is encouraged to put the mission over his team, the seasoned spy simply won’t accept it. “Your life will always matter more to me than my own,” he tells them. “If anything happens to them, there’s no place that I won’t go to kill you, that is written,” he warns the film’s antagonist Gabriel (Esai Morales) elsewhere.

If the #1 takeaway of the trailer is Ethan’s love for his IMF family, the #2 takeaway is, of course, stunts, stunts, and more stunts. Cruise can be seen battling on top of a moving train, speeding through car chases, and notably riding a motorcycle at high speed right off of a cliff. One expects nothing less of the man who gives his MTV Movie & TV Award acceptance speech while actively flying a jet.

Dead Reckoning has been a long time coming. (Remember when Cruise was recorded ranting to the film’s crew about COVID protocols way back in 2020?) After many delays and shifting of schedules, the film is finally set to premiere on July 12 2023, with Part Two set for June 2024. The film, directed by Christopher McQuarrie, also stars Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Henry Czerny, Vanessa Kirby, Frederick Schmidt, Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Cary Elwes, Rob Delaney, Indira Varma, Shea Whigham, Mark Gatiss, Esai Morales and Charles Parnell.