Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One Trailer: Time To Pick A Side

If you're just now joining us on the Tom Cruise whistle-stop movie tour, the film we had all been calling "Mission: Impossible 7" since before I can remember now has an official title: "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One." Not only that, it now has an official trailer.

The unveiling of the title for "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" came late last month with the exhibition of footage during the annual CinemaCon event for theater owners in Las Vegas. Fast forward a month later to the present, and we're all looking down the barrel of another major Cruise sequel, "Top Gun: Maverick."

Ahead of that movie's release, the trailer for "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" leaked online — but who wants to watch a leaked trailer when you can watch the official one from Paramount Pictures? "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" sees Cruise returning for the seventh time as IMF (Impossible Missions Force) agent Ethan Hunt, and as always, he'll be running (and running) and risking life and limb in crazy action stunts that he has performed himself (because that's just how Cruise rolls).

"Dead Reckoning Part One" is written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, and the stacked cast includes Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Vanessa Kirby, Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Cary Elwes, Indira Varma, Shea Whigham, Esai Morales, Rob Delaney, Frederick Schmidt, Charles Parnell, and Mark Gatiss.

Check out the trailer for "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One," below.

As its title implies, "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" is the first part of a story that will continue in "Dead Reckoning Part Two," which is set to conclude the Cruise-led movie series (at least until the studio decides to revive it with a different actor).

The "Mission: Impossible" film franchise has been going for over 25 years now, and it started off on okay footing, earning mixed-to-positive reviews for its first three installments. Personally, as someone who grew up watching episodes of the short-lived '80s "Mission: Impossible" revival on TV with his dad, I still have a soft spot for the original 1996 Brian De Palma film, which made the bold move of killing off a whole IMF team in the first reel. In "Dead Reckoning Part One," the aforementioned Henry Czerny is, for the first time, set to reprise his role from that first movie as former IMF director Eugene Kittridge, whose face still lingers in Dutch angles in memory.

Fifteen years later, when "Incredibles" director Brad Bird made his live-action crossover with "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol" in 2011, the series entered a new phase, earning progressively better reviews so that it hasn't dropped below a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes since. The last installment, 2018's "Mission: Impossible – Fallout," was the best-reviewed entry in the series yet, and now we have "Dead Reckoning Part One" and "Part Two" to look forward to in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

Expectations are high, but barring any further release delays, you'll be able to see how "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" turned out when it hits theaters on July 14, 2023.