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When Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning hits screens imminently, it’ll mark 29 years since Tom Cruise first portrayed franchise protagonist Ethan Hunt. As you’d expect, this near-three-decade history is something The Final Reckoning (like its immediate predecessor, 2023’s Dead Reckoning) leans into, hard — well, kinda.

Sure, Ethan Hunt’s past is one of the primary drivers of the seventh and eighth Mission: Impossible installments’ two-part story. Without it, the plot and emotional stakes wouldn’t work. Yet as much as Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning (what we’ve seen of it, at least) leverage time for all it’s worth, they simultaneously — and resolutely — refuse to acknowledge that Hunt (and Cruise) have aged.

Ethan Hunt’s 30-year career is the engine that powers Mission: Impossible 7 and 8

While all the Mission: Impossible movies are designed to function as standalone flicks (even Dead Reckoning’s cliffhanger ending offers some sense of closure), the franchise has steadily become more continuity-dependent ever since 2011’s Ghost Protocol. The deep bond between Ethan and his IMF buddies (particularly his long-serving teammates Luther and Benji) runs throughout the more recent sequels. His latter-day love interests, Julia Meade and Ilsa Faust, carry over film-to-film, too.

But no Mission: Impossible outing — not even 2018’s Fallout, with its focus on wrapping up the Ethan/Julia romance — contextualizes its callbacks to earlier canon with tangible timescales the way Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning do. All we need to know, all the filmmakers seemingly want us to know, is that Ethan’s been at this a while now. 

By contrast, the first thing Ethan’s one-time IMF boss Eugene Kittridge does when he makes his belated franchise return in Dead Reckoning is to explicitly frame the film’s narrative as part of a wider, 30-year chain of events spanning (and even predating) the entire franchise.

“Our lives are the sum of our choices and we cannot escape the past,” Kittridge snarls over a flashback of baddie Gabriel murdering Ethan’s former lover, Marie, in 1993. This immediately grants an air of gravity to proceedings; the Ethan/Gabriel rivalry isn’t just personal, it’s old — and, as an audience, we intuitively understand that we should care about it more than Ethan’s other, baggage-free feuds. 

And by prominently signposting the exact duration of Ethan Hunt’s IMF stint  — being blamed for Marie’s murder led Hunt to seek amnesty with the espionage outfit — Dead Reckoning effectively boosts the credibility of its other antagonist, predictive AI construct the Entity. Of course, Ethan’s in trouble against this thing: The Entity’s been trained on three decades’ worth of his IMF exploits. All those choices Kittridge was banging on about? They’re now weapons to be used against him, in Dead Reckoning and beyond.

They’re also a symbol of Ethan’s enduring heartache — of all the people he cared about and lost, because of decisions he made. That’s the emotional throughline of Dead Reckoning, really: our hero’s desperate desire to keep everyone around him safe, despite knowing first-hand that he can’t. We know it, as well, because the whole movie is constantly reminding us that Ethan’s been fighting the good fight — at great personal cost — for longer than a not-insignificant chunk of viewers have been alive. That’s why Dead Reckoning’s story ultimately has more heft than the average popcorn blockbuster.

The same goes for Ethan’s earnest plea to his friends, “I need you to trust me, one last time,” in The Final Reckoning’s trailer. A line like that only lands if audiences fully appreciate that the people Ethan’s talking to have known him for 10, 20, even 30 years; that he’s spent decades nurturing their faith in him. And thanks to Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning’s emphasis on the passage of time, we do. 

Time stands still for Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible 7 and 8

All of which makes both movies’ presentation of a perma-young Ethan Hunt that much more jarring. True, the photo attached to Ethan’s CIA file in Dead Reckoning is of a fresher-faced, 29-year-old Cruise, so it’s not like there are no concessions to the natural flow of time. But other than that, the film (and presumably, its sequel) has zero interest in tackling Ethan’s age—or rather, that for all intents and purposes, he hasn’t aged.

Nobody remarks on how unlikely it is that Ethan, 58 or 59 in-universe, just shy of Cruise’s 62 — is still an active field agent. There are no quips about Hunt transitioning to a desk job, or even hanging up his parachute for good. Admittedly, Kittridge suggests that Hunt’s service in the IMF effectively amounts to a debt of service he’s paying off to the US Government, which could preclude him from retiring. Still, it’s a tad strange that neither of the two most recent Mission: Impossible movies is willing to even handwave at Ethan graduating to a less hands-on role.

But then why would he? Ethan doesn’t show any signs of diminished athletic prowess in Dead Reckoning or The Final Reckoning. He’s still sprinting across rooftops and dangling from planes at least as well as a guy half his age. Rival spy franchises James Bond and Jason Bourne eventually nodded towards their respective leads, Daniel Craig and Matt Damon, growing visibly older and starting to run out of steam. But Mission: Impossible’s leading man remains as sprightly as he looks.

Unlike Gabriel, Luther, Benji, and Kittridge — all of whom are unmistakably in their 50s or even 60s — Ethan Hunt (like the man who plays him) could pass for 40-something. He’s still sporting a full head of dark, grey-free hair and has few wrinkles to speak of. Does he match his youthful mugshot flashed on screen in Dead Reckoning? Not exactly. But we see that pic so fleetingly — and don’t see pre-IMF Ethan’s face at all in the aforementioned flashback sequence (plans to digitally de-age Cruise were scrapped early on) — that any sense of Ethan having physically matured in a meaningful way over the past 30 years quickly evaporates. While time shapes the world around Ethan Hunt in Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning, it leaves the secret agent himself untouched.

How Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 pull off an ageless protagonist steeped in history

On paper, this disconnect between time and aging risks derailing Mission: Impossible 7 and 8. But in practice, it’s something most of us clock up front, then gradually get over, for two reasons.

The first is fairly obvious: the Mission: Impossible franchise isn’t shooting for realism. This is a world where jumping a motorbike off a mountain to catch a speeding train doesn’t end in tragedy. Where ultra-convincing latex masks and exploding bubblegum are tools of the trade. And where someone like Ethan Hunt is plausibly the IMF’s top field operative after 30 years. In a sense, he’s more superhero than spy — stockpiling past escapades without succumbing to old age in the same way the likes of Superman and Batman have stayed fit and healthy for the better part of a century now.

The second reason is even simpler: seeing is believing. What does it matter that Ethan Hunt is canonically in his late 50s (or Cruise is in his early 60s) if he still looks and acts young enough to get the job done? And in both cases, he does. No matter what his secret is — and I’ll leave such speculation to the gossip outlets — the well-preserved Cruise presents as 20 or more years younger than he really is in Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning, even in IMAX. It’s also clearly him performing both movies’ hair-raising stunts, further selling his character’s near-superhuman longevity. Of course, Ethan still has what it takes; it’s all up there on the screen.

And so long as that holds true, age isn’t likely to catch up with Ethan, no matter how much more time goes by — or how many more Mission: Impossible movies we get. 

The Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning movie arrives in theaters on May 23, 2025. For more intel on Ethan Hunt’s next adventure, check out our Final Reckoning guide, which covers the sequel’s plot, cast, and more.

Here's how to watch the Mission: Impossible movies & TV series in order.