“Mission: Impossible” has become one of Paramount’s longest and most durable franchises, yielding eight movies over 29 years — including this month’s “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” — after starting as a TV series three decades before that. It’s also the perfect title for the seemingly impossible mission its corporate parent and chairman Shari Redstone faces: Trying to save the Skydance Media merger without sacrificing the integrity of CBS News and “60 Minutes.”
Redstone can easily be painted as the villain in this scenario, particularly if the company waves the white flag of surrender to President Donald Trump and opts not to stand behind its news division. In reality, though, in “Mission” parlance she’s more of a mid-level bureaucrat, forced to choose the less onerous of two terrible options.
It’s Trump, rather, who wears the black hat, holding the company’s plans hostage — through his administration’s Federal Communications Commission — in seeking CBS’ capitulation over a “60 Minutes” profile of then-campaign rival Kamala Harris on wholly dubious grounds.
Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit, then doubled that, and now appears to be holding the culmination of Paramount-Skydance in the balance under the guise of regulatory concerns. (Trump’s FCC chief, Brendan Carr, has denied that the lawsuit has played a role in the approval process, which, given his boss’ track record, has been treated with understandable skepticism.)
Redstone will inevitably be cast in an unflattering light, and weather a blizzard of bad publicity, should she be perceived as having sold out the studio’s venerable newsmagazine on the altar of greed — in this case, the $8 billion merger price.
Still, some have more charitably assessed the situation for what it is: nn unprecedented kind of shakedown, catching Paramount at a point of extreme vulnerability as Redstone tries to salvage the company her father Sumner built — and get out from under the weight of its debt — by passing the reins to another member of the media legacy class, Skydance’s David Ellison, who negotiated the deal with support from his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
Media mogul Barry Diller nicely summed up Redstone’s dilemma in a recent New York Times profile, saying that while “the idea of settling this idiot suit is horrible,” given Paramount’s financial status, one can sympathize with the necessity to “bend the knee if there’s a guillotine at your head.”
For those who have followed Paramount’s off-screen adventure, the arc of “Mission: Impossible” — and its evolution across seven different decades — feels especially appropriate, particularly with an eighth chapter likely to at least temporarily sideline the franchise (nothing this valuable can stay dormant for long), appropriately subtitled “The Final Reckoning.”
Then again, “Mission: Impossible” has crisscrossed history in a variety of ways, morphing from a Cold War creation in the mid-1960s into a pawn during a Writers Guild of America strike to, more happily, a James Bond-esque movie vehicle for Tom Cruise.
The original series ran for seven seasons, periodically changing characters along the way, as its elite IM Force carried out secret missions often behind the Iron Curtain, knowing that if caught or killed, “the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.”
When “Mission: Impossible” rose again in the late 1980s, it was for the sort of wholly pragmatic reasons that reflect the corporate thinking behind Paramount’s current predicament. Faced with a WGA strike, the studio reworked scripts from old episodes, shooting them in Australia to save money.
The ABC revival show ran two seasons, with Peter Graves — who forever made his comedy mark in between thanks to “Airplane!” —reprising his role as Jim Phelps. Graves, who died in 2010, would later decline to appear in the first movie, disapproving of the narrative twist involving his character. Trump’s current “special ambassador to Hollywood” Jon Voight played the part instead.
Having amassed more than $4 billion worldwide at the box office, the “Mission” franchise holds a place alongside “Star Trek” (which as it happens premiered on TV the same month) among Paramount mainstays, robustly surviving the leap from TV to big screen. The films also represent a collaboration between Paramount and Skydance, indicative of their close ties in advance of their corporate nuptials.
Director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie said in one advance interview that he hopes the latest film serves as “the satisfying conclusion to a 30-year story arc,” referring to Cruise’s enviable durability in the role of Ethan Hunt, and the film certainly has the nostalgic feel of an homage to the movies across the decades.
In addition, the high-stakes plot repeatedly returns to the question of what to do when you seemingly have no good options — “There is always another choice,” Hunt is told at one point — as characters weigh the lesser of two evils and debate what qualifies as acceptable collateral damage.
In that sense, this eighth “Mission” possesses unavoidable parallels to Redstone and Paramount’s situation, albeit with the company’s future hanging in the balance, not the world’s.
Trump has extracted concessions from multiple media and tech companies since his reelection, but none predicated on anything flimsier than his demands related to “60 Minutes,” which engaged in editing practices considered standard throughout the TV industry. Signaling as much, the segment recently received a News & Documentary Emmy nomination, which felt like a not-so-subtle message from those voters to Redstone and her lawyers.
Not that such gestures are apt to matter when there’s a 10-digit sales figure at stake. After all, CBS executives played out a similar scenario over the network’s merger with Westinghouse in the mid-1990s — right before “Mission” first hit theaters — which resulted in a different movie, “The Insider,” chronicling how faced with the corporate priorities of a skittish legal department, journalism came out on the losing end.
Should history repeat itself, no one needs to shed any tears for Redstone. Like Mr. Phelps, she knew the mission was dangerous when she decided to accept it.
Still, she’s not the one who set these events in motion. And unlike those messages to Phelps or his able successor Ethan Hunt, the stories that will be written about how Paramount responded to Trump’s threat won’t self-destruct in five seconds.
“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” hits U.S. theaters May 23.
