Of course, killing off Ethan Hunt in The Final Reckoning would have meant that the door to any future Tom Cruise-led Mission: Impossible installments would have been firmly shut.

Through eight Mission: Impossible movies across three decades, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt clearly had his favorite teammates among the Impossible Mission Force. Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) were Ethan’s ride-or-die guys, while Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) was like a force of nature in three of the M:I films. So what happened …