The Future Of 'Mission: Impossible' Couldn't Be Better, 6 Movies In

Mission: Impossible — Fallout hits theaters on July 27, and it's a flick you might want to get popcorn for, as it lasts almost two and a half hours. But since an Mission Impossible — Fallout post credits scene doesn't exist, at least you know you can leave right after the movie ends. Still, the lack of after-credits sequence doesn't mean that the Tom Cruise-led series ends with this installment.

Although post-credits scenes are pretty common nowadays, you shouldn't go see Fallout thinking that Cruise is considering the film his last time playing Ethan Hunt due to the movie's lack of one. Instead, it sounds like Cruise has high hopes for many more M:I movies in the future. According to Hindustan Times, Cruise told the British magazine Total Film, "I have a lot of ideas about the next phase, about the next two or three, of where I want to go. I’m not ready to discuss it now, but you’ll be able to see when you see this movie. It’s very much the epic in all of this series."

Those surely aren't the words of someone who thinks the newest movie will be the last Mission: Impossible. Cruise's co-star, Simon Pegg, who plays Benjamin "Benji" Dunn also predicts that a seventh M:I movie will come out after Fallout. "The story shows no sign of slowing down," Pegg told Brazilian Cinepop. Cruise himself shows no signs either, seeing as the 56-year-old actor still did all of his own stunts in Fallout.

Not only does Cruise do his own stunts, but you might call him a stunt purist, because the actor prefers to pull off stunts without using green screens or CGI effects, as Variety reports. Clearly, Cruise doesn't like to make his role as Ethan easy on himself, and even the stunt coordinators have had their doubts about his ambitions. In a featurette from Paramount Pictures about M:I 6, aerial coordinator Marc Wolff shared his apprehensions about filming a helicopter sequence. He said, "Flying a helicopter takes a lot of skill, to put someone like Tom [Cruise] into a situation like this is almost impossible to imagine."

Cruise ended up learning how to fly a helicopter on his own, and in record time, apparently. In the same featurette, Airbus Chief Instructor Tim McAdams marveled, "There are very few students that have his level of dedication and focus." The team behind production of the helicopter chase scene evidently had a lot of faith in Cruise, because the actor even filmed the scene without any crew members in the helicopter with him. Co-star Henry Cavill holds his own in that scene, too, making it an all-around mind-blowing sequence.

It's pretty impressive to see Cruise fly the helicopter, knowing both that he hadn't known how to fly one beforehand and that he was totally by himself in the vehicle. That's exactly why people love the Mission: Impossible movies though — its stunts are basically unmatched by any other action movie, even in the age of CGI.

And if the series is set to continue, which it sounds like it is, it will likely only continue to raise the bar with each installment.