Mission: Impossible III · reception & legacy

2006 · J.J. Abrams

How Mission: Impossible III has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

In 2006 it was the flop that wasn't really a flop — reviews were solid but the box office sagged under the weight of Tom Cruise's couch-jumping, Oprah-era PR meltdown. Two decades on, it's the franchise's designated 'actually underrated' entry, largely on the strength of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

What's debated

The eternal M:I ranking fight: is this the secret best one because Hoffman's Owen Davian is the franchise's only great villain, or the most anonymous entry — the one that looks like a very expensive episode of Alias?

Its footprint

Hoffman's quiet, terrifying 'count to ten' plane threat is endlessly clipped and quoted, and the never-explained Rabbit's Foot MacGuffin became a go-to exhibit in every debate about J.J. Abrams' 'mystery box' storytelling. It also introduced Simon Pegg's Benji, now a franchise pillar.

Where it stands

A canon climber: routinely rescued in franchise-ranking threads and Letterboxd reviews as the misunderstood middle child of the series.

★ Did you know? The fallout was so bad that Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone publicly blamed Cruise's off-screen behavior for the film's underperformance and ended Paramount's 14-year relationship with him in 2006 — a split Cruise's producing partner learned about from the press. It was also J.J. Abrams' feature directing debut; Cruise hired him after binge-watching Alias.