Recent scholarship has shown how classical music, including opera, is re-conceptualized in films of the digital age (Citron 2011, Kramer 2013). It has also been pointed out, however, that opera is a cultural object whose meaning has fluctuated throughout history (Till 2012). This paper draws attention to the audio-visual representations of opera in contemporary action film, with specific focus on Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015). I analyze how the film combines representations of a particular operatic performance with distinctive action sequences. This analysis is then compared with similar combinations in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) and Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace (2008), leading me to the conclusion that McQuarrie’s film constitutes a representative example of how conceptualizations of opera are negotiated in contemporary popular media. Even though the operatic performance is clearly adapted to the typical narrative structures of the action blockbuster and the effects made possible by digitalization, the film articulates concepts of classical music, and opera in particular, belonging firmly to the aesthetics of the 19th- and the early 20th centuries.