‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning’ Credits Pay Tribute To Late Mogul Sumner Redstone, “Film Lover And Friend”

Dade Hayes
·2 min read
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After a flurry of action set pieces and plot twists, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One concludes on a more contemplative note.

Toward the latter part of the end credits, it offers a salute to the media titan who acquired Paramount Pictures and positioned it at the center of the Viacom-CBS empires he controlled for three-plus decades. “To Sumner Redstone,” the acknowledgement reads, “film lover and friend.”

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Asked about the shout-out, a Paramount rep told Deadline it was intended as a show of respect from star/producer Tom Cruise and the rest of the team behind the film, which started production less than a month after Redstone died in 2020 at age 97. But the studio declined to elaborate on the gesture.

The phrase “film lover” was not the primary description to appear in the many remembrances of Redstone’s memorable run as an entertainment billionaire. By the time of his death, the chairman emeritus of ViacomCBS (now Paramount Global) had long slipped into medical infirmity and a legal thicket, his voice uncharacteristically silent.

Ultimately, the film business would be a cornerstone of Redstone’s legacy. After building theater chain National Amusements into a successful exhibition chain, Redstone launched his bid for moguldom in 1987 by engineering a hostile takeover of MTV and Nickelodeon parent Viacom. Seven years later, he prevailed in the battle for Paramount. He reveled in outdueling Barry Diller to gain control of Paramount and relished the role of movie mogul, walking red carpets and working the phones to monitor the grosses of every one of his studio’s releases.

Cruise vaulted to the top tier of Hollywood’s A-list after Paramount’s 1986 release of Top Gun. After remaining highly bankable in subsequent years, including with the debut Mission: Impossible outing in 1996, the tide turned. In 2006, Redstone abruptly canceled Cruise’s production deal and banished him from the lot after concluding that the actor-producer’s off-set behavior was hurting the studio’s business. “He was jumping on the couch on the Oprah show,” Redstone later recalled. “Women hated him.” (The financial terms of Cruise’s deal also influenced the decision, of course.)

Before long, the pair reconciled and, in 2008, Cruise appeared in Paramount comedy Tropic Thunder, playing studio boss Les Grossman. The exaggerated character was said to have been at least partly inspired by Cruise’s many dealings with Redstone.

After portraying Grossman earned him a Golden Globe nomination and helped restore his tarnished public image, Cruise resumed his Mission for the studio. The fourth, fifth and sixth installments took the franchise to new heights, grossing between $695 million and $787 million globally from their 2011, 2015 and 2018 releases.

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