Among their many merits, the Mission: Impossible movies are an important source of schadenfreude for Tom Cruise haters; although Ethan Hunt always wins the day eventually, he goes through a lot of punishment to get there, and the knowledge that much of that trauma is actually happening to Cruise’s actual, increasingly battered body is enough to put a dark glow in a people’s hearts. Now Paramount has confirmed that we’ll be getting at least another three years of wondering if this is the stunt that finally does old T-Bone in, setting 2021 and 2022 release dates for Mission: Impossibles 7 and 8.
For those keeping track, that means Cruise will be a fresh-faced 59 when Mission: Impossible 8 arrives in theaters on August 5, 2022, a high-profile film premiere whose red carpet, we can only assume, will be chosen to hide the stains if Tom starts internally bleeding everywhere in the aftermath of his latest motorcycle-based cinematic suicide attempt. 7, meanwhile, will premiere on July 23, 2021, making these the rare pair of big-budget movie deadlines almost entirely based on the cartilage resilience of a man rounding the corner toward 60 like the very fate of the world depended on it.