The budget for upcoming action sequel Mission: Impossible 7 has blown up far beyond anything even the quick-thinking Ethan Hunt could have expected, with a new report from Variety revealing that it has cost Paramount $290 million. Thanks to the aspirations of star Tom Cruise alongside the dramatic hurdles thrown up by real-world goings-on, Mission: Impossible 7 has cost the studio a whole lot more money than they intended to use to make the movie, well, possible.

Mission: Impossible 7 is expected to once again hurl Tom Cruise into all manner of death-defying situations in the name of our entertainment. Hugely expensive death-defying situations, it seems. Due to the constant delays and pushbacks to production and the swathe of health and safety regulations that were required thanks to the plague sweeping the world, Cruise’s desire to put his life in jeopardy suddenly became a lot more costly than ever.

“Considering this stunt and others like it had to be pulled off in the midst of a globe-rattling pandemic,” the report from Variety states, Paramount and Skydance Media were left “shouldering a massive budget and an endless stream of unforeseen expenses.” Thus, “Mission: Impossible 7” cost $290 million to produce” which, unsurprisingly, is a whole lot more than the studio had ever planned to spend. “That eye-popping price tag includes the substantial tax incentives that the global production was able to leverage to rein in costs,” the report continues.

To put this astronomical production price tag in perspective, the last installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, cost the studio $190 million. Let’s hope that Ethan Hunt’s next adventure was worth it.

Both Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 Will End the Journey of Tom Cruise’s Agent Ethan Hunt

Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, plot details for Mission: Impossible 7 remain a closely guarded secret, but the director has previously teased the theme that will run through not just number 7, but the next two installments in the series. According to McQuarrie, both Mission: Impossible 7 and Mission: Impossible 8 will bring Ethan Hunt's story to an end, with the sequels taking the intrepid secret agent back to the beginning of his journey, as well as provide a much more emotional journey for the unstoppable action hero.

This idea has now been confirmed in this recent report, which states that the “plan is for the seventh and eighth films to serve as a sendoff for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character,” and goes on to describe the intention for the pair of sequels to be a “culmination” of the entire series.

Starring Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Angela Bassett, and Frederick Schmidt, all of whom reprise their roles from the previous movies, along with Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, Esai Morales, Rob Delaney, Charles Parnell, Indira Varma, Mark Gatiss, and Cary Elwes, Mission: Impossible 7 is scheduled for release on July 14th, 2023, with Mission: Impossible 8 set to debut on June 28th, 2024.