When Mission: Impossible opened in theaters on May 22, 1996, it put Tom Cruise—who performs his own stunts—at the center of a franchise that would reshape blockbuster spectacle.
The original picture was a commercial success from the start: produced for $80 million, it went on to gross $457.7 million worldwide. That return bought Paramount decades of sequels; over the next 30 years the studio released new Mission: Impossible installments until the series grew into an eight-movie franchise that has brought in well over $4 billion worldwide.
The film’s early numbers sit alongside uneven critical reaction. On aggregate review sites the first Mission: Impossible posted a 65 percent score, its immediate sequel scored 57 percent, and the third installment landed at 73 percent. The first three entries were not Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, even as the franchise’s identity hardened around Cruise’s willingness to sell stunts as spectacle. Early set pieces—Cruise dangling from the ceiling of the CIA headquarters, climbing mountains—were the first notes in a stunt-driven score that later included hanging off the side of an airplane and leaping a motorcycle off a cliff.
Mission: Impossible was squarely adapted from the TV series that ran from 1966 to 1973 for seven seasons. The movie reworked familiar elements and characters: Jim Phelps, played on television by Peter Graves, was recast in 1996 and played by Jon Voight, and that film ends with Phelps dying in a fight with Ethan Hunt. Those choices put the film in conversation with its source material while also clearing room for a new kind of lead—one defined less by team-based sleight of hand and more by a single performer's physical risk-taking.
There is a friction at the heart of the franchise’s rise. The early films were commercially successful but met mixed criticism, and the series arrived at the modern critical respectability that many point to only after 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Creative leadership did not stay fixed: the first five films were directed by different filmmakers, a churn that makes the franchise’s stylistic evolution less a straight line than a sequence of reinventions. Some commentators later hailed the series as one of the greatest franchises ever, while others have kept returning to the original film’s moral pivot—arguing the treacherous leader in the story was the team’s own Jim Phelps—evidence that the movie invited debate as well as box-office receipts.
The practical takeaway is clear: the 1996 film’s gamble paid off. By pairing a television brand with star-powered spectacle and a lead willing to perform extreme stunts, Mission: Impossible turned an $80 million investment into a $457.7 million launchpad and a franchise that would expand across eight films and more than $4 billion in box-office revenue. In that sense the original mission impossible did more than revive a television property—it built a template, imperfect at first, that became the engine of one of Hollywood’s biggest ongoing franchises.
