Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Star Tom Cruise Gets Dangerous in New Video Featuring His Wildest Stunt Ever

By Russ Burlingame

Ahead of the release of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise has shared some more insight into the work that went into what he and filmmaker Chris McQuarrie have promoted as "the biggest stunt in cinema history." The stunt, which involves Cruise parachuting out of a helicopter, then driving a motorcycle off a cliff, into a base jump, has been a key focus of the promotional campaign for the movie, and was apparently one of the very first things filmed, so that they could get it out of the way and get on with the rest of the film.  Earlier this year, the studio released a featurette that centered on the motorcycle jump. This time, it's the speedflying -- essentially parasailing out of the base jump -- that takes center stage.

To get the footage needed for the film, Cruise did the stunt six times over the course of a day. Luckily, he was fairly well-rested, because Mission: Impossible tends to start production with their biggest stunt, meaning that he was coming into it after whatever break he got between movies.

You can see the video below.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One stars Cruise and returning stars Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Henry Czerny, and Vanessa Kirby. New cast members include Hayley Atwell (Agent Carter) and Pom Klementieff (Guardians of the Galaxy), Rob Delaney (Deadpool 2), Charles Parnell (Top Gun: Maverick), Indira Varma (Game of Thrones), and Mark Gatiss (Sherlock). 

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One wrapped production last year. Director Chris McQuarrie previously spoke about the meaning behind of the Dead Reckoning title, which was revealed at CinemaCon along with Cruise's introduction.

"When I came up with the title, I knew it applied more to Part Two than it did to Part One, which is why it eventually settled on being Part One and Part Two," McQuarrie told  Light the Fuse. "The title for the first movie was nearly ... a title that referred to something like a Ghost Protocol kind of thing, it was a government policy – It wasn't a government policy, it was a government, what would you call it? A government measure of last resort, with catastrophic consequences. By the time we got to the end of Part One, that had distilled down into an entirely different set of circumstances that appear in Part Two and not in Part One. So, the word would no longer have been appropriate for the title of Part One."

He continued, "And yet, Dead Reckoning didn't really apply as well to Part One as well as it did to Part Two until we started to play with the beginning of the movie, and kind of recognize that Dead Reckoning, while it sounded cool, what did it really have to do with the movie? And over the course of our, really starting to dig down into the arc of the character journey for Ethan [Hunt], it took on deeper and deeper meanings as we went. And you'll see just how thematic and how it represents, how it's conceptually represented in every character's journey in this film we're in."

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is due in theaters on July 14.

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