Tom Cruise has been making Mission: Impossible movies for nearly 30 years. The franchise has been a lot of different things in that time, but for the past decade – from when Christopher McQuarrie stepped into the director’s chair and ended an unofficial tradition of each entry being handed to a new filmmaker – it’s meant something specific to the action movie landscape.

If the marketing around Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is to be believed, that run may have come to an end this year. In Hollywood’s IP era, there’s reason to be suspicious of that, but I happen to believe it.

I doubt Mission as an enterprise is over. But, with ballooning costs, diminishing returns, and Final Reckoning‘s dramatic escalation of the stakes, the days of seeing this version of Mission on your local IMAX screen are probably behind us.

That might feel like the end of an era in action movies. But it isn’t; not really. What’s made the last 10 years of Mission: Impossible movies feel distinct isn’t anything intrinsic to the franchise, but the specific approach to filmmaking that went into them. And the creative partnership that fueled it remains alive and well.

Tom Cruise Will Keep Working With Christopher McQuarrie After Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Even If It’s Not In This Franchise

Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie have been working together since the 2000s. McQuarrie’s directed Cruise five times – 2012’s Jack Reacher and their four Mission movies – and has officially written or produced another five. Their collaboration has defined this stretch of both of their careers. Watch them together on a press tour, and they’re practically joined at the hip.

These two clearly want the same things from their movies, and they’ve refined a process based on chasing each other’s interests. The Mission: Impossible films have been their greatest vehicle for this, and at its best, it has produced some of the greatest action spectacle of the 21st Century. That’s hard for fans like me to say goodbye to.

But that franchise doesn’t have to be their only outlet, and they show no signs of slowing down. Their names have been attached to multiple projects in development, but McQuarrie himself confirmed he plans to direct Cruise next in Broadsword, rumored to be a WW2 action movie about an American pilot behind enemy lines.

Whatever the story, it will be very light on dialogue; McQuarrie revealed to Happy Sad Confused that Cruise has “fewer than 500 lines in the whole movie.” The Final Recknoning may have been heavy on exposition, too heavy for some, but it also featured two long, showstopping action sequences with hardly any dialogue at all. Clearly, this is something they want to explore further.

It might even be good for the Cruise-McQuarrie era to leave Mission: Impossible behind. This last movie was weighed down by the franchise’s history at times, but when it could leave all that behind to focus on Cruise’s next death-defying stunt, it soared. It’s fun to imagine what they might make now, free of Ethan Hunt’s baggage.

So, Mission fans, do not despair. That caliber of action filmmaking we’ve come to expect isn’t going away entirely. The next one might just come wrapped in different packaging.