The Dark Knight Rises wasn’t the only sequel to be named this week.

At a press conference in Dubai, Tom Cruise announced the official title for the next Mission Impossible film – while simultaneously confusing us in the process.

"One of the things I always wanted for the franchise was for it not to have a number afterwards," Cruise stated.

"I’ve never done sequels to films and I never thought of these films as sequels. Paramount has done a great job in coming up with a title, so it’s not going to be MI2, 3, 4: It’s going to be Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol."

So should we not consider the second and third Mission films to be sequels even though they have numbers in them? Did Tom forget that he did more than one film based on the Mission series? Do numbers written as Roman numerals not count?

And what does this mean for his supposed involvement in the Top Gun sequel?

Ghost Protocol – with co-starring Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Josh Holloway – will open on December 16, 2011.