Believe MI1 is the end of the era of the Hollywood Brats. DePalma only left with one more somewhat decent movie in his career...Snake Eyes. Francis Ford Copolla fall behind everyone's radar. George Lucas have yet to release any of the SW prequels which everyone's knew how it went down. Only Spielberg left standing to be remnant of the collective group of directors.

Honestly all I remembered was Cruise dangling mid-air and Jon Voight playing Judas in a convoluted chess game. At least White Widow from Fallout is a call back to Vanessa Redgrave's character of the first movie. Should another sequel forthcoming, she could be another recurring character or the next big bad. Guess maybe there's another 3 more MI movies in Cruise if he can still sprint like Usain Bolt.

For me the weakest link is the 3rd one although it has one of the best villain to date. John Woo is the pop culture moment that peaked during that time. It's quite cringey to revisit it right now or didn't aged well in my opinion. Ghost Protocol can be very stale once you watched it the second time. Rogue Nation is a technical editing achievement when how to plot action sequences especially the memorable opera segment. Again just my personal opinion and it's perfectly fine to disagree with it.

My tinfoil hat theory is JJ Abrams couldn't decide whether he is making an episode of TV or a blockbuster movie. It just didn't hit the wow factor of a summer popcorn movie. Maybe I'm bias against him but just not totally sold he is that top shelf film director that commands the status of he is at right now. Well that just me....lol....
Whereas I have more respect for the company he is running cause it did launched careers of Damon Lindeloff, Matt Reeves, Dan Trachtenberg, etc.....