MI:4 is officially Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

We’ve been getting a lot of official names of major projects this past week with first TRANSFORMERS: THE DARK OF THE MOON and then THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. Well now we know that instead of another number, Tom Cruise’s next turn as Ethan Hunt will be called MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL.

The announcement was made at an event in Dubai yesterday where the film is currently shooting. Cruise himself made the big reveal about the title, though I think the giant banner behind him might have ruined the surprise.

“It’s not gonna be MI 2, MI 3, MI 4, but it’s gonna be Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol… that will be the title of this film,” Cruise told a news conference in the Gulf city-state.

“One of the things that I always wanted with the franchise was for it to not have a number afterwards, because I haven’t made sequels of films, and I never really thought of these films as sequels,” Cruise said. “When you see each one of them, I think it’s distinctive of each film-maker who has worked on the series. It’s a series that I love doing.”

So we have a title, but no real plot yet, only that Cruise will be supervising a younger agent, played by the recently cast Jeremy Renner. Presumably it will involve him sprinting somewhere full tilt at some point during the film.

I’m excited for this, I really am. Yes, in part because of Brad Bird and JJ Abrams’ involvement, but I’m also still a Cruise fan after all these years and his couch jumping and Xenu bullshit. People say KNIGHT AND DAY was an indicator that his star was fading, I say it was an indicator that KNIGHT AND DAY sucked balls, and nothing about that was his fault, other than picking the project in the first place. In any case, I have high hopes for MI4, I mean GHOST PROTOCOL.