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The blockbuster of 2025 so far, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is bookended by two scenes in the heart of London. The movie opens with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his team, including tech wiz Benji (Simon Pegg) and computer specialist Luther (Ving Rhames), emerging from Trafalgar Square tube station and into a throng of police and protestors all on the edge of a riot with armoured trucks standing by. Evil A.I. The Entity has taken control and martial law has been imposed on society.
The second scene we won’t spoil, except to say that it has the IMF crew back in the same bustling corner of Trafalgar Square and exiting the same Zone 1 station.
Amid this dystopian set-up, eagle-eyed viewers will have spotted one major anomaly in the two scenes: Trafalgar Square tube station, of course, does not exist.
‘Charing Cross Station has an entrance in Trafalgar Square but to get Tom and all those extras in – and to get The National Gallery in the background – this new tube station was born,’ explains the film’s supervising location manager Niall O’Shea.
‘All the Mission: Impossible movies are love letters to the cities they’re in – Fallout is Paris, Dead Reckoning is Rome and Paris – so Trafalgar Square picked itself. It's where a big protest would happen.’
Creating the fictional tube station and filming in Trafalgar Square required close collaboration with TFL (Transport For London) – not least in creating the iconic roundel sign for the fictional station. ‘The roundels are copyrighted and they kindly gave us the digital model [to work with] and permission to go ahead,’ says O’Shea. ‘The sign is like a red bus or a postbox, it tells the audience we're in London.’
In real life, the movie’s station exit is the actually entrance to the Heritage Wardens’ office. ’The wardens look after Trafalgar Square,’ says O’Shea. ‘They stop people putting Fairy Liquid in the fountains, keep it clean and manage it as an event space.’
Out went the wardens, in came Cruise, Pegg, director Christopher McQuarrie, a small army of cast, crew and extras and ‘a big travelling circus’ of trucks, drones and lighting rigs in April 2025. ‘We had the square closed for 24 hours on a Sunday,’ remembers O’Shea. ‘The martial law element was dressed at 11am, the shoot crew turned up at 2pm, we filmed the daytime stuff until about 7pm, redressed it until 10-11pm, then shot til dawn. We gave it back to Londoners first thing on Monday morning.’
So where are the Trafalgar Square station signs now? ‘I know there were a few people who thought it'd make a great piece of film memorabilia,’ says O’Shea, ‘but no one will own up to having it’.
Read our review of Tom Cruise’s franchise-wrapping action epic here.
‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’: a travel guide to the globe-spanning blockbuster.