When did the “Mission: Impossible” films become action movies?

Eagerly anticipating the author’s next article, “Is it time for America to elect its first Black President?”

Yet the ballpark-similar, barely-good-enough-to-get-by domestic box office grosses of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” ($150 million), “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” ($170 million) and “Fast X” ($145 million) should be telling us something: that action, as a selling point, may have peaked, entering a period of overexposed exhaustion. Of all those franchises, the “M:I” films are the last ones that should be coasting on the coolness of a Fiat 500 zooming around Rome. Cruise and McQuarrie’s mission, should they choose to accept it, is to make this series fascinating again by remembering that the ultimate movie stunt is still the one that wows your brain.

I’m not sure that conclusion is supported. There’s so much going on that’s affecting the Box Office performance of films that aren’t part of An Event, but a franchise no longer being to your individual taste probably isn’t one of them.