Should you choose to accept it, the original ‘Mission: Impossible’ film turns 25 Sunday

The original Mission: Impossible movie turns 25 years old Sunday.

The Tom Cruise-produced franchise is now shooting its seventh and eighth installments. To date, the six M:I films have grossed more than $3.75 billion in theaters worldwide.

The original movie, also starring Jon VoightVing Rhames and Emmanuelle Béart, made nearly $458 million globally. However, Cruise recalls in press materials provided by Paramount Pictures that when he decided to adapt the ’60s TV show of the same name into a movie, people thought he was crazy: “People would go, like, ‘I don’t get it. Like, you’re going to do a TV series?…That old series?’”

The first film has Cruise’s super-spy Ethan Hunt on the run, framed for the deaths of his team after a mission gone wrong. Hunt then discovers there’s a mole in his operation, and concocts a plan to steal from the CIA a top secret list of spies’ identities to flush out the traitor.

Cruise recruited director Brian De Palma and was convinced he had the right person when De Palma pitched him the now-famous “vault” scene over a cellphone call.

“I just went, ‘OK, this movie’s really cool!’” Cruise laughs.

That now-iconic scene, which had Cruise suspended from wires like a spider over a floor rigged to an alarm, took many takes. “I kept slamming my face into the floor,” the star recalls. Eventually, some weighted coins in his shoes balanced him.

“I was holding it, holding it…I’m sweating and I’m sweating, and then he just keeps rolling…And I just hear [De Palma] off camera, like he’s got a very distinct laugh…I could just hear him start to howl and he goes, ‘All right! Cut,’” Cruise laughs.

The next Mission: Impossible hits theaters May 22, 2022.

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