'Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning' trailer drops

After having stunned a gathering of movie-theater owners at the CinemaCon trade show last month, the teaser trailer for "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" became public Monday morning online.

"It's all led up to this," star Tom Cruise's Twitter and Facebook accounts said, with links, minutes after the unveiling at Paramount Pictures' YouTube channel. A few additional minutes later, a joint post on the Instagram accounts of Cruise and of the "Mission: Impossible" action-movie franchise said, "We all share the same fate."

The 2-minute, 15-second trailer opens with a rider on horseback galloping through a desert dust storm, pursued by more than a half-dozen other riders. Cutting to Vatican City and Rome, a small yellow car barrels through narrow streets. Glimpses of a blue-tinged nightclub appear next, then a motorcycle rider on a winding country road. And then, as a train chugs by a forest river and a shadowy fight scene is shown, viewers first hear and then see Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), head of the quasi-governmental Impossible Mission Force in the franchise's original 1996 movie, pointedly telling Cruise's agent Ethan Hunt, "Your days of fighting for the so-called greater good are over."

Amid split-second shots including those of Hunt driving a sedan without doors, soldiers in desert-combat gear storming a sand-tossed outpost, new characters played by Hayley Atwell and Esai Morales, returning IMF members Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and much more, Kittridge continues: "This is our chance to control the truth — the concepts of right and wrong for everyone for centuries to come. You're fighting to save an ideal that doesn't exist. Never did. You need to pick a side." Hunt gazes back with clenched jaw, doubtful and defiant.

In additional shots throughout are an eye-patched woman aiming a high-powered rifle, an underwater explosion near a submarine and, from 2018's "Mission: Impossible — Fallout," Vanessa Kirby as philanthropist Alanna Mitsopolis, aka the illegal arms dealer and money launderer the White Widow, daughter of the original film's villainous Max (Vanessa Redgrave). Other scenes show the IMF team cross the plaza of Saint Mark's Basilica in Venice; Pom Klementieff's character attacking Hunt in hand-to-hand combat; a train engine hurting over a mountain trestle; and Hunt riding his motorcycle over a cliff, presumably planning to open a parachute.

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, this seventh film in the franchise is set for release in July 2023.