10 Reasons Why Mission: Impossible Is The Best Film Franchise Ever

If there's one thing that this franchise has above all others, it's the trump card of its leading man. Leaving his personal beliefs at the side, there are few movie stars like Cruise left in the game - figures whose boundless enthusiasm and charisma for their projects shines through no matter how misbegotten it can be.

With M:I, it's far from misbegotten - it's a near-perfect match of man and movie, rolled into six distinct installments so far. Without Cruise, there is no Mission: Impossible franchise on the big screen. Without Mission: Impossible in fact, there is probably no Cruise as a bona-fide action hero of the past twenty years in other fare, for good and ill.

Few stars will be as intrinsically linked to a franchise like Cruise will be when he eventually hangs up his stunt boots - but unlike many of his contemporaries, there will be little question of it casting a shadow over his wider career or persona either. Perhaps that's because Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt, in a sense - or vice versa perhaps too.

By the time the franchise's eighth entry rumbles out in November 2022, it will be 26 years between its first and potentially final entry, a period that will have seen three live-action iterations of Spider-Man, four iterations of Batman and potentially as many as five presidents of the United States of America come and go.

There's one man at the heart of that remarkably longevity, one man who continues to push it to lengths and heights unknown - and his name is Tom Cruise.