Mission: Impossible Deserves To Be As Successful As Fast & Furious

As popular as they already are, the Mission: Impossible movies deserve to achieve the same level of success as the Fast & Furious franchise. There are few older action properties that’ve adapted to the golden age of superhero blockbusters as well as Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious. The former was already (in)famous for making Tom Cruise run the gauntlet when it comes to his stunt-work, yet has managed to find increasingly brazen ways of putting its star in mortal danger with each new installment over the last ten years (at Cruise’s behest, no less).

Fast & Furious, like Mission: Impossible, has always been known for its high-octane action, going back to its humble beginnings as a mid-budget crime thriller. Yet, the same year the latter stepped its game up (in terms of death-defying stunt work) with 2011’s Ghost Protocol, the former reinvented itself with Fast Five, a sequel that combined an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist plot with spectacle and action sequences that don’t break break the laws of physics so much as shatter them. The Fast & Furious movies have only continued to evolve since then, achieving newfound levels of both critical and commercial success along the way.

The Mission: Impossible movies, by comparison, haven’t changed their formula so much as gradually refined it by carrying over the elements that worked in the earlier films (like Simon Pegg as the tech-savvy Benji Dunn), and discarding those that didn’t. As with Fast & Furious, this has allowed the brand to win over more and more critics while simultaneously improving its performance at the box office in recent years. Yet, to understand why the series hasn’t caught up with The Fast Saga just yet, one needs to look back at where they came from first.

Mission: Impossible And Fast & Furious Are Both Long-Running Action Franchises

Unless you actually watched the original TV show, it’s easy to forget the Mission: Impossible brand began as a 1960s series about the members of a fictional intelligence agency known as the Impossible Missions Force. The first movie was released in time to commemorate the show’s 30th anniversary in 1996, at a time when Cruise was already an A-lister, but known for being more of a character actor than action star. Five years later, the world was introduced to Vin Diesel as Dominic Toretto in 2001’s The Fate of the Furious. At that point, Diesel had only barely started to make a name for himself, beginning with his well-received supporting role in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan three years earlier and carrying over to his equally memorable debut as the character Richard B. Riddick in 2000’s Pitch Black. Since then, both Cruise and Diesel have evolved into the faces of their respective properties (at least, as far as the mainline entries are concerned).

It’s funny how almost quaint the stunts in the original Mission: Impossible and The Fast and the Furious seem compared to those in their sequels. Both franchises started out with adrenaline-fueled set pieces involving truck hijackings and characters trying to escape from a moving high-speed train via helicopter, yet have only (massively) escalated things since then. But whereas Mission: Impossible has gone the route of having Cruise perform one ridiculous practical stunt after another, Fast & Furious has gone off the rails entirely by combining CGI with practical techniques in order to send cars skydiving out of planes or, as seen in the trailer for the upcoming Fast & Furious 9, swinging from one cliffside to another using a bridge cable (like it’s Tarzan holding onto a vine). So it goes, though, when you’re an action franchise about to turn twenty, or facing thirty in the case of the Mission: Impossible films.

Mission: Impossible Deserves To Be As Successful As Fast & Furious (If Not More So)

Depending on who you ask, there’s either never been a bad Mission: Impossible film or, failing that, there’s never been one that failed to deliver in the thrills department. (Even the worst-reviewed entry, Mission: Impossible 2, has rightly been defended for establishing the mold for what the franchise would become later on.) Of late, the series has been on an especially strong run, beginning with Christopher McQuarrie taking over as writer-director on 2015’s Rogue Nation. Under his watch, the movies have only grown sharper and more refined, in terms of not only only their plotting, but also their visuals, stunts, and even character arcs. Even before that, a string of directors (Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird) were able to put their stamps on their respective installments, keeping the property feeling fresh in a way it wouldn’t have otherwise.

Whether you prefer one to the other or like them both equally, it would be fair to argue the most recent Mission: Impossible movies have been better than the latest Fast & Furious films. Their spectacle might not be as gleefully ridiculous as the latter’s, but McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible movies are simply stronger when it comes to using action scenes as a means for both advancing the plot and character development. The series has already begun to reap the rewards financially, with Mission: Impossible – Fallout being widely proclaimed as the action movie of summer 2018 and taking home a franchise-high $791.1 million at the global box office (which is also a record for Cruise). At the same time, with a reception like that, Fallout should’ve easily been able to pass the $1 billion mark, much in the same way Fast & Furious 7 and The Fate of the Furious did.

Why Fast & Furious Is More Successful Than Mission: Impossible

In theory, Mission: Impossible ought to be more popular than Fast & Furious: it’s been around longer (and, thusly, has more multigenerational appeal), Cruise is a bigger star than Diesel (in terms of his ability to draw audiences outside of a recognizable brand), and the overall series has fared better with critics. Of course, things start to change when you factor in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson joining the latter in Fast Five and spinning it off into his own sub-franchise with Hobbs & Shaw. There’s also the matter of diversity: the original Fast and the Furious was relatively inclusive with its casting when it came out in 2001 (more so than the first Mission: Impossible), and the sequels have only taken things further in that direction. Combine all that with the franchise going international, beginning with 2006’s Tokyo Drift, and it’s no wonder Fast & Furious has the worldwide appeal it does.

There’s also the matter of age to consider. The Mission: Impossible films may’ve only started five years before the Fast & Furious movies did, yet they’ve never fully abandoned the campier elements from the original ’60 TV show (particularly, their use of rubber mask disguises and literal self-destructing messages), and have kept both of their feet planted in the spy/secret agent genre. Fast & Furious, on the other hand, has always been a franchise made for the 21st century: its earlier installments may come across as (often, amusingly) dated products of the 2000s nowadays, but even their focus on multiracial family units and hotshot outlaws-turned working-class superheroes make them feel distinctly modern in a way the Mission: Impossible films might not. When push come to shove, vehicular mayhem is perhaps just cooler to more people than old-school spy work (no matter how slick their gadgets are).

Can Mission: Impossible 7 & 8 Match Fast & Furious’ Success?

Commercially, Mission: Impossible is growing, so it’s entirely possible the upcoming seventh and eighth films will be the first to finally gain access to the $1 billion club. There’s valid reason to think they will, too: in the same way audiences have grown to love Dominic Toretto and his family, the Mission: Impossible franchise has now established a core team around Cruise (consisting of Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Rebecca Ferguson), as a way of broadening the property’s appeal. Helping matters, Mission: Impossible 7 is poised to bring back Vanessa Kirby as the enigmatic White Widow from Fallout, while at the same time adding even more star-power in the forms of MCU veterans like Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff. On top of all that, there’s the question of Cruise’s stunts and how on earth he intends to top his previous dances with death this time around, giving moviegoers all the more reason to tune in and find out.

Of course, Fast & Furious isn’t slacking off either, what with John Cena costarring in Fast & Furious 9 as Dom’s brother-turned enemy Jakob and Sung Kang reprising his role as the fan-favorite Han Lue in the film (following his presumed death in Tokyo Drift). The franchise has also gotten to the point where it’s preparing to finish its mainline story with the upcoming – and, potentially, two-part – Fast & Furious 10. Presumably, Mission: Impossible will do something similar with its next two movies, if only because Cruise’s age (he just turned 58 this month) will make it, er, impossible for him to keep going the way he has for much longer. If the series manages to go out with a bang creatively, while finally matching the success of Fast & Furious, it would be a well-earned outcome.