Abandon Shipping: Ethan/Brandt, which was once one of the popular ships in the fandom behind Ethan/Benji, gradually dropped in popularity when Brandt didn't appear in Fallout due to his actor Jeremy Renner having scheduling conflicts with Avengers: Endgame and the low chance that he'd appear in any future installments, with many Ethan/Brandt shippers gravitating to Ethan/Benji instead.
Owen Davian is a sociopathic, powerful international Arms Dealer who is notorious for selling to different terrorists. Davian wants to find the Rabbit's Foot, a highly dangerous weapon which Davian is going to give to John Musgrave and start a war in the Middle East which would kill many people. When he captures an agent who is spying on him, he brutally tortures her and plants a bomb inside of her head, detonating the bomb when she is finally rescued. When Davian is interrogated by Ethan Hunt, he gloats about killing the agent, saying that the only real reason he did it was because it was fun, before threatening to do the same to Ethan and his wife, no matter what, which he attempts to do multiple times, even going as far as to disguise his own security chief as Ethan's wife, and then killing her, just to torture Ethan. In his final moments, he keeps his promise, and decides to kill Ethan's wife, with Ethan Forced to Watch.
John Musgrave, the IMF's Director of Operations, poses as a friend to Ethan while plotting for war in the Middle East out of racism. Contracting Davian to locate the Rabbit's Foot, Musgrave intends on reporting the weapon's sale to terrorists to justify an invasion, while ready to replace Davian with any other merchant of death should Davian fail. Callously manipulating his fellow IMF colleagues, Musgrave boasts of his plan to a captive Ethan while threatening to have Davian kill his innocent fiancée.
Ghost Protocol: Sabine Moreau is a cruel contract killer who introduces herself by shooting Agent Hanaway to swipe his briefcase, leaving him on the cusp of death so he'll die in his lover's arms. The contents of the briefcase are nuclear launch codes that Moreau plans to sell to Kurt "Cobalt" Hendricks, so he can use them to kickstart a nuclear holocaust. When she meets who she believes to be Cobalt, Moreau tries to have his henchman executed to prove she's serious about the deal. Moreau doesn't care about Cobalt's cause or the billions who will die from the nuclear codes, simply wanting diamonds for her services.
Rogue Nation & Fallout: Solomon Lane is a former MI6 operative who, after realizing his own sociopathic nature, became enraged and went rogue with the Syndicate to cover up his own deficiencies. Using the Syndicate to carry out devastating terrorist attacks while committing murders himself, Lane was defeated and arrested by Ethan Hunt and his team. Two years later, Lane uses his ally John Lark—aka August Walker—to get free, now hell-bent on revenge against Ethan. To that end, he uses stolen plutonium to rig two nuclear bombs to go off in Kashmir, at a medical site where Ethan's ex-wife Julia is working just out of spite. The nukes will irradiate the water supplies of China, India and Pakistan, affecting a third of the Earth's population while Lane is fine dying in the blast so long as he knows Ethan is framed for being Lark and will rot in a jail cell for the rest of his life haunted by the guilt of Julia's death. Abandoning all pretense of good intentions, Lane shows that he is a dark mirror to Hunt himself, stopping at nothing to achieve his ends, no matter how many have to die.
Fandom Rivalry: There are passionate arguments between M:I fans and James Bond fans about which is the best Spy Fiction film series of the current era, more exactly between the M:I movies since Mission: Impossible III and Daniel Craig's Bond films.
Fanon Discontinuity: Diehard fans of the original series like to pretend the films never existed mainly due to Phelps turning out to be a villain and Tom Cruise stealing the spotlight.
Ethan Hunt/Benji Dunn aka Benthan is the biggest ship in the fan base. This is mainly due to the chemistry between Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg and the Ho Yay that they have in later films. On most sites like Tumblr or AO3, Ethan/Benji easily outranks Ethan being shipped with either his former wife Julia Meade or his new canon Love Interest Ilsa Faust.
Julia was married to Ethan before eventually getting remarried to Erik. Despite this, pairing Ethan and Julia also remains very popular among fans today, mainly because Erik has very little characterization beyond being a Nice Guy.
Even Better Sequel: An unusual case where each film generally has (bar John Woo's entry, see below) received better critical reviews than the last one, with many now calling Fallout the best installment. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for the first six are, from one to seven: 63%, 57%, 70%, 93%, 93%, and 97%, while the Metacritic scores are, from one to seven: 59, 59, 66, 73, 75, and 86. The series seems to have reached a ceiling with Dead Reckoning having a still impressive 96% and 81 respectively.
Growing the Beard: The first film was generally well received but had some backlash due to liberties taken next to the original tv show while the second film was a success as an action film but even further divorced from the espionage. The third film triggered two things, one was an emphasis on the whole team performing complicated missions together and the other was demonstrating a notably different tone from both the first and second films. It was a modest success critically and financially compared to the previous films, but this culminated in the fourth film Ghost Protocol which was able to combine the best aspects of prior films into a massive blockbuster. The films since then have received comparable acclaim.
Just Here for Godzilla: Starting with Ghost Protocol, a large selling point for the series is its impressive in-camera stunts performed by Tom Cruise with No Stunt Double.
Memetic Badass: Ethan Hunt (and/or Tom Cruise himself). He almost doesn't need any additional elevation given the death-defying stunts he has to pull in every instalment, but he's nevertheless elevated to near-immortal status in the public consciousness.
Memetic Mutation: The many impressive stunts performed by Tom Cruise for the series have led to jokes about increasingly ridiculous things he has supposedly done to make the movies "more realistic", such as actually murdering the actors playing the films' villains or having plastic surgery done for scenes involving masks.
My Real Daddy: J. J. Abrams, who directed and wrote the third film and has remained onboard the series as producer for all subsequent installments, and Christopher McQuarrie, who contributed to the fourth film and wrote and directed the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth. Under their involvement, the films have been seen blending a very strong mix of the more cerebral mind game aspects of the original movie and the more over-the-top action set pieces of the second, as well as introducing mainstays in the series like Benji Dunn and Ilsa Faust, with the more consistent cast allowing a greater focus on the whole team ensemble that some detractors of the first two films felt were missing. Since the two have gotten involved the series has been getting better reviews with each film, with the sixth getting the strongest yet. This also extends to Ethan's characterization in the movies beginning with M:I 3, combining his personality as The Chessmaster who outsmarted his enemies and never fired a gun or threw a punch in the first movie, with his gun-toting action hero portrayal in the second, and having them complement each other, so that while he is adept in a fight and can hold his own well, he primarily prefers out-thinking his opponents and only relies on direct combat if he's left with no other recourse. It's this characterization that stuck, and has continued through all the sequels after the third.
Sophomore Slump: While some moviegoers appreciated the easier-to-follow storyline, Mission: Impossible II is considered inferior despite (or because of) the flashy action (noticeably, it gets the smallest real estate on the six-film collection box art seen on the main page). The third film was seen as much better and getting things back on track. The fourth, fifth and sixth are the best reviewed films in the series.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The series has a tendency to introduce a new agent to Ethan's IMF team only to have them no longer appear in any future films with no explanation as to what happened to them. Some examples include Billy from II, Zhen and Declan from III, Carter from Ghost Protocol, and Brandt after Rogue Nation. Brandt in particular being a major case since him getting a second film made it look like he was going to be a new main-stay.
