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Tom Cruise attempts cinema’s biggest stunt in Mission: Impossible 7 featurette

Dan Girolamo
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Tom Cruise thanked fans yesterday for their support of Top Gun: Maverick after jumping out of a plane and completing a solo freefall dive. Yet, that wasn’t the craziest thing captured on camera as Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (also known as Mission: Impossible 7 or M:I 7) released a behind-the-scenes look at the “biggest stunt in cinema history.”

The 9-minute video brings the audience back to the first day of shooting M:I 7 in September 2020 when Cruise prepared to jump a motorcycle off a cliff, complete a base jump, and parachute to safety. While the stunt seems out of this world, Cruise calmly says that he’s wanted to do this since he was a “little kid.”

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One | The Biggest Stunt in Cinema History (Tom Cruise)

For a stunt that took seconds to complete, it took well over a year of preparation and training. Cruise had to perfect base jumping, skydiving, canopy control, and motocross before he could even practice the jump. Cruise completed over 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps in preparation for the stunt. Countless hours of practice on a model ramp were needed to calculate the speed and angles of Cruise’s jump so writer/director Christopher McQuarrie knew where to put each camera. When it came time to complete the stunt in Norway, in true Tom Cruise fashion, he did it not once, but six times.

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Dead Reckoning Part One will be the seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible film franchise. Alongside Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, and Henry Czerny will reprise their roles from the previous M:I films.

Tom Cruise talks with Christopher McQuarrie on the set of Mission: Impossible 7.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One hits theaters on July 14, 2023. 

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Dan Girolamo
Dan Girolamo
Entertainment Writer
Dan is a passionate and multitalented content creator with experience in pop culture, entertainment, and sports. Throughout…
Why the first Mission: Impossible movie is still the best one
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Everyone loves the Mission: Impossible movies. There are a variety of reasons why: they offer old-fashioned cinematic thrills; they are a form of escapism akin to the James Bond movies, but tougher and more American; they feature one of the last truly great movie stars, Tom Cruise. Ever since the fourth installment, Ghost Protocol, resurrected the genre from pop culture oblivion, the conventional wisdom is that the modern M: I films just keep getting better and better, and are the series' best entries.

Well, nuts to that. I'm not going to defend the much-maligned M: I 2, which doesn't really deserve reconsideration (seriously, what's with all those doves?), but the original Mission: Impossible, in my eyes, is perfection, and hasn't been topped by any other M: I film ... or any action movie, for that matter. The peak of '90s Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking, Mission: Impossible delivers two cinematic giants, Cruise and director Brian De Palma, at the height of their powers, and is perhaps the most fun mainstream movie Hollywood ever produced. Here are just a few reasons why the original M: I still holds up today.
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Since it first arrived on the big screen in 1996, the Mission: Impossible film franchise has thrilled audiences with increasingly ambitious practical stunts. Star and producer Tom Cruise won’t be satisfied until he’s shown gravity who’s boss once and for all, diving off of increasingly high platforms at increasingly deadly speeds. The daredevil feats have become such essential parts of the Mission: Impossible films and their marketing that one could almost forget the stories that these stunts are meant to service.
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Mission: Impossible III gets a bit of a bad rap for its efforts to ground the series in something approaching reality, and it can definitely be argued that director J.J. Abrams’ more TV-style aesthetic was an overcorrection from John Woo’s unrestrained bombast. We’ll stand behind M:I-3’s more human and emotional characterization of Ethan Hunt, the romance subplot, and of course, the outstanding performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the villain, but we do have to admit that the choice to essentially skip this movie’s main heist sequence is pretty disappointing.
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It's been five years since the release of Mission: Impossible - Fallout, but the latest film in the series has finally arrived. Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie have reunited for the new sequel, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1, and this is a story that has finally given Ethan Hunt (Cruise) a foe that he can't easily dispatch. The Entity is something that Ethan has never had to contend with before, and it will push him and his team to their limits.

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