The greed of the AMPTP studios and their refusal to make a deal with striking workers—specifically SAG-AFTRA members—has claimed another high-profile movie victim. Almost exactly two months after Warner Bros. Discovery decided to bump Dune: Part 2 into 2024, Paramount and Skydance have bumped Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part Two all the way from June of next year to May 23, 2025. On top of that, Variety says the movie will be retitled, meaning it won’t be called Dead Reckoning Part Two, which means there will have been a Dead Reckoning Part One and that’s it.
Variety says the plot will still directly follow the events of Part One, wherein a malevolent AI (as if there’s another kind) called The Entity tried to do bad AI stuff and Ethan Hunt had to collect two halves of a special key before the bad guys could, but it’ll just have a different name now. Paramount could (and probably should) retcon the title of Part One at some point, but luckily this wouldn’t be the first time that a Tom Cruise movie was retitled after it came out.
Or the studio could just go nuts with the formatting and call the next one Mission: Impossible—Some New Title (Dead Reckoning Part Two), which would be cool. Also, if Paramount is taking suggestions, we wouldn’t be opposed to more Lupin The Third references or some kind of miraculous return for Ilsa Faust.
Also, there is some quiet good news in here for any M:I fans who were disheartened by Paramount’s decision to send Dead Reckoning Part One off to die just one week before the Barbenheimer weekend, as the studio has secured a three-week exclusive Imax run for whatever Part Two ends up being called in 2025. That means it will be easier to see, even if two of the biggest movies of 2025 (Barbie Vs. Hot Wheels and Oppenheimer 2: Rise Of Teller) end up coming out a few days later.
Mission: Impossible isn’t the only movie getting delayed today because of strike-related delays, with Variety saying that Quiet Place prequel/spin-off Day One is moving from June of next year to March 8, 2024, and an untitled SpongeBob SquarePants movie is going from May of 2025 to December of 2025.
