He understood the assignment—Tom Cruise is Hollywood’s most famous daredevil and the upcoming Mission Impossible 7 proves it. Fans thought they had seen it all when they watched the actor climb and run down the world’s tallest building and hang off the side of an airplane.
Apparently, those stunts weren’t enough for Cruise. The director of Mission Impossible 7, Christopher McQuarrie, revealed at CinemaCon that Cruise performed his most dangerous stunt ever. But what could be more perilous than gripping a plane and skydiving a HALO jump?
What are Tom Cruise’s well-known stunts?
Starting with the first 1996 flick, Cruise performed the iconic cable scene. But most viewers aren’t aware that the memorable scene was nearly cut. According to Entertainment Weekly, Cruise admitted the stunt became difficult.
“I remember we were running out of time, and I went down to the floor, and I kept hitting my face,” the Jerry Maguire actor recalled.
The director was close to cutting the scene, but Cruise insisted he could execute it. He thought the idea of coins balancing out his weight would help. Luckily, he was correct and the director kept the scene.
Another remarkable MI stunt was when Cruise scaled the world’s tallest building in Dubai. Swinging, climbing, running on a harness, Cruise successfully shot the infamous scene for Ghost Protocol.
For Mission Impossible II, Ethan Hunt jumps out of a helicopter but Cruise filmed this with a green screen. However, the War of the Worlds actor actually jumped out of a plane at 25,000 feet for Fallout. The skilled stuntman prepared for the dangerous scene by skydiving a HALO jump several times a day.
Tom Cruise does the impossible for ‘Mission Impossible 7’
Paramount Pictures hosted a back-to-back Cruise double feature; they unveiled Top Gun: Maverick and Mission Impossible 7 at CinemaCon on Aug. 26, 2021.
According to Deadline, Paramount played a featurette of McQuarrie saying this was Cruise’s most perilous stunt ever (so far). The Jack Reacher actor trained to execute the stunt for one year, performing 500 skydives and 13,000 motorbike jumps.
“This is far and away the most dangerous thing I’ve attempted,” Cruise said in the behind-the-scenes video. “We’ve been working on this for years. I wanted to do it since I was a little kid.”
The extreme stunt is riding a motorbike off a huge cliff and into a valley in Norway.
At the end of the CinemaCon video, McQuarrie teased audiences for the next film: “The only thing that scares me more is what we have planned for Mission 8,” he said.
The new flick is set for a May 27, 2022 release date.
Tom Cruise was robbed filming ‘Mission Impossible 7’
While Cruise was doing the impossible for his new movie, he was robbed in the U.K. Per The Sun; the thieves accomplished their mission using a strikingly similar tech-related interception that Mission Impossible is known for. In Birmingham, the thieves stole Cruise’s bodyguard’s $100,000 BMW. The actor’s expensive luggage was in the car.
Although Cruise has an elite security team, the thieves managed to steal the car and luggage by scanning the BMW’s ignition fob and cloning it.
An unnamed source claimed, “It has since been recovered by police because it was equipped with an electronic tracking device, but everything inside it was gone. It’s a huge embarrassment for the security team, and the guy who had been driving it was hopping mad—but not as mad as Tom.”
