After this summer’s blockbuster release of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, you might find yourself wondering: Can I stream Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One? Where can I watch Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One online? Is Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One available for rent or video on demand? How Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One watch now go please?
Well, wonder no more. The latest installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, is now available to watch at home! The Tom Cruise film is currently available to purchase on demand for $19.99 on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, and YouTube. It is not currently available to rent. The Blu-Ray release will be on October 31st, and at some later date Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One will be available to stream on Paramount+. It is also available for free on BitTorrent and Usenet newsgroups.
OK, now that I’ve got that SEO out of the way, I’d like to instead talk about how to prepare to watch Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, organized by how much time you’re willing to devote.
No Time
Just go watch the movie, you’ll be able to follow and enjoy it just fine. See it on the biggest screen with the best sound you can.
A Few Minutes
Here’s what you need to know, assuming no prior knowledge.
- These are spy movies about an American intelligence agency called the IMF (Impossible Missions Force), doing missions that are impossible.
- But these movies actually revolve around Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt.
- Tom Cruise does his own stunts, so every action scene you see him do is pretty much exactly what’s actually happening, and that’s the fun of it. When he’s riding a motorcycle with no helmet, it’s because the movie wants you to see that it’s Tom Cruise, and if he was wearing a helmet you’d just assume it was a stunt double.
- Spies in Mission: Impossible have the ability to wear masks that make them look like anyone else as well as mimic their voices. The best moment in any Mission: Impossible movie is when someone peels off the mask, it’s akin to using NOS in the Fast & Furious movies. A running gag in the later movies is that the mask printing machine frequently breaks and the team will have to scramble.
- Other top Mission: Impossible tropes: Tom Cruise’s character going rogue, being assigned a mission via some form of tape that self destructs after playing, Tom Cruise sprinting long distances.
- Over time, the series has evolved so that the most important thing in the main characters’ lives is their friends. It’s almost identical to the emphasis on family in the Fast & Furious movies.
- If I had to briefly describe Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, in my own words: There is no secret he cannot extract, no security he cannot breach, no person he cannot become. He has most likely anticipated this very conversation and is waiting to strike in whatever direction we move. Sir, Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny - and he has made you his mission.
Many Hours
Your best bet is to simply rewatch the other Mission: Impossible movies, all streaming on Paramount+ and BitTorrent. The movies are: 1, 2, 3, Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and Fallout. Ideally, watch all of them in order. The only one that’s pretty objectively bad is 2 (although it’s a very fun silly watch), but 2 and 3 are the ones to skip. If you can only watch a few and just want to be able to understand what’s going on in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, I’d watch Fallout and 1. But the best action scene in any of the movies is in Ghost Protocol.
Too Much Time
I really like the Blank Check podcast, and they’ve covered all of the Mission: Impossible movies. Their Ghost Protocol episode is available for free, and they later did commentary episodes of every single movie on their Patreon feed. These episodes are really fun and provide a lot of great context and information about the making of these movies. For a quick taste you can also read host David Sims’ article What Mission: Impossible Understands About Tom Cruise.
As mentioned frequently on the Blank Check episodes, the director of the last several Mission: Impossible films, Chris McQuarrie, has some incredible in-depth interviews on the Empire Film Podcast covering Rogue Nation and Fallout. Those old episodes are now behind a paywall, but you can find links to them on Reddit. I was shocked by how much I enjoyed listening to Chris McQuarrie talk about his process on these movies. He doesn’t sound like any other director I’ve heard in interviews. His big break in the film industry was writing The Usual Suspects, which won him an Oscar. After that he spent years as a “script doctor”, doing uncredited rewrites for movies like Batman & Robin and X-Men. He started working with Tom Cruise after writing Valkyrie, and they’ve since become inseparable. He works really well with Tom Cruise and they both really get how to play to his strengths. Chris McQuarrie doesn’t believe in auteur theory, swears by test screenings as part of his process, and has a very healthy understanding for how little an audience is paying attention. He enjoys making intricate spy plots in Mission: Impossible movies, but also understands that most viewers won’t be paying enough attention so he makes sure that you can follow his movies without sweating the details. There’s a lot more that surprised me about the way he works, but it’s better to hear him talk about it on these episodes.
Way Too Much Time
If you’ve done all of the above and still would like more, you should check out the Light The Fuse podcast. Light The Fuse has been releasing weekly episodes since 2018, with a simple premise: interview anyone they can find who has worked on any Mission: Impossible movie. This includes actors, directors, editors, but also stunt doubles, makeup artists, visual effects artists, and even a marketing intern. The interviews are definitely not hard-hitting since many of the subjects are still active in their careers and the hosts of the show are super fans, but the secret sauce of each episode is that every single guest has at least one good Tom Cruise story from working on these movies. Still, I’d recommend listening to these at 2X speed or so since the guests aren’t usually used to being interviewed and things can move a little slowly.
This year, Light The Fuse was declared the official podcast of Mission: Impossible, and has gotten to go to red carpet premieres and given more direct access to the cast and crew for interviews. Unfortunately, that also means the 238 episodes recorded beforehand are no longer available on their main feed, and are instead only able to be streamed from their site. This is a bummer, but it does make sense that Paramount wouldn’t want to mark these older episodes as “official”, since they can occasionally say negative things about the movies. Fortunately for you, I’ve gone rogue and scraped their site to generate a Light the Fuse: Rogue Backlog Feed. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to pick a few episodes that sound interesting to you and jump in! Here are a few that I enjoyed:
- Director Christopher McQuarrie on episodes 28 and 29.
- Brad Bird, director of Ghost Protocol, on episodes 39 40 and 41.
- Barney Burman, Makeup Artist, on episodes 47 and 48. Him talking about how they make the Mission: Impossible masks was fascinating.
- Keith Campbell, Tom Cruise’s stunt double, on episodes 70 71 and 72. A funny wrinkle to this is that Keith Campbell made a career out of being Tom Cruise’s stunt double, until Tom Cruise decided to always do his own stunts and never needed him again.
- Stu Maschwitz, Digital Effects Artist for Mission: Impossible, on episodes 64 65 and 66. I loved hearing Stu talk about the challenges of doing digital effects for a movie in 1996.
- Todd Vaziri, Digital Effects Artist for Mission: Impossible III and Ghost Protocol, on episodes 67 and 68.
- Craig O’Brien, Skydiving Camera Operator for Fallout, on episode 166.
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