For the next Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise drove a bike off a cliff and landed with a parachute.
Is it his craziest stunt? Here are 7 other contenders:
1/ In Top Gun:Maverick, Cruise flew a real F-18A that hit 550mph and he withstood up to 1600lbs of pressure (~8Gs).
2/ MI: GHOST PROTOCOL (2011)
Cruise famously climbed the outside of the world’s largest building: the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (2,722 feet high)
The stunt take place around 80% of that height. Cruise fired one insurance firm because they wouldn’t insure him if he did the scene.
3/ MI:ROGUE NATION (2015)
Cruise clung to the door of a military plane that hit 260mph and flew >1000 feet in the air.
He wore a body harness that was roped to an aluminum plate in the plane. You see the rope in the raw footage (bottom). Cruise says he “was scared shitless.”
4/ MI:FALLOUT (2018)
Cruise did a HALO (high-altitude, low open) parachute jump out of a C-17 military transport plane. It’s a 25,000 foot jump.
Absurdly, Cruise did >100 jumps on a semi-broken ankle and had to get within exactly 3ft of a parachuting camera man to get the shot.
5/ MI:2 (2000)
In the first MI sequel, Cruise climbed a 2,000 foot Utah cliff with only a safety rope (dude really likes extreme climbs).
Director John Woo brought on an expert climber to do the stunts, but Cruise did it all (incl. an insane 15-foot gap jump between 2 cliffs).
6/ A FEW GOOD MEN (1992)
Cruise went up against one of the greatest actors ever, Jack Nicholson.
After an intense courtroom scene, he worked up the balls to ask Nicholson if he ordered “the Code Red”. Might be the craziest stunt ever.
7/ MI:FALLOUT (2018)
Cruise piloted a helicopter solo at low altitudes while doing insane stunts (a “360 downward spiral”).
All while controlling the camera.
To prep, he put in ~500 hours of helicopter training over a one-month period.
8/ MI: DEAD RECKONING PT. 1
The next MI will come out in July 2023 and the studio just released a featurette of Cruise’s motorbike cliff jump.
He did 6x takes of the scene!
Cruise is legit running out of wild stunts to do (him and Nolan need to talk about a real A-bomb).
If you enjoyed that, check out my Saturday email on tech and media.
The craziest stunt I’ve done is write a clickbaity subject line that doesn’t perfectly capture the content but lead to higher open rates: getrevue.co/profile/trungt…
NOTE: I can’t edit the first tweet (think cause there’s a vid), so editing here.
Cruise *flew in* the F-18A because Navy wouldn’t clear him to fly it. But he does fly “a P-51 propeller-driven fighter plane, as well as some helicopters” in the film.
Cruise learned to hold his breath for 6.5 minutes for an underwater scene (although most takes were only 4 mins).
He said he was taught by free divers and says “it’s not pleasant.”
Matt Damon has a wild story of the time he asked Cruise about the Burj Khalifa climb.
Pretty sure “safety guy” is code for “insurance firm”.
🔗
If you’ve made it this far, check out this Christoper Nolan piece of all the times he used practical effects and minimized use of CGI (gonna add the Cruise links here too).
Remember the exoskeleton armour in Cruise’s time travel war movie? They were made to be as real as possible and weighed 85lbs to 120lbs (depending on the scene).
For shooting, Cruise wore the suit 6 hours a day while performing various stunts.
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But the most unrealistic scene from Cameron’s entire catalog (Avatar, Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator) is Rose throwing away a $10m diamond necklace into the ocean after holding onto it for 84 years.
On Titanic’s timing.
The film was originally slated for a summer July release. It got pushed to Dec, which historically has less blockbuster competition. In fact, 5 of the 6 longest streaks at #1 were Nov/Dec releases.
Titanic also cleaned up during Awards Season (Jan-Mar).
Quickbooks marketing Slack channel must be wildin’ after catching this stray in the FTX congressional hearing:
“They used Quickbooks! A multibillion dollar company using Quickbooks! Nothing against Quickbooks. A very nice tool, but not for a billion dollar company."
The Quickbooks marketing team needs to ride this wave and update its landing page
Follow Autism Capital for a running thread on the Congressional hearing including this gem