Watch the “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” Stunt That Earned Tom Cruise a Guinness World Record
It’s been well documented—on this site, no less—the extent to which Tom Cruise has put his body on the line for his Mission: Impossible franchise. Thirty years after we watched Cruise break into the CIA’s Black Vault in director Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, we now have a portion of our cinematic memory bank filled with nothing but Cruise’s stunt work. We have seen him scale the 2,700-foot Burj Khalifa in 2011’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol and held our breath as we watched him hanging off the side of an Airbus A400m in 2015’s Rogue Nation. In 2018’s Fallout, he became the first actor to perform a HALO (High Altitude Low Open) jump on film, and later, in the same film, watched his mastery of helicopter piloting. For 2023’s Dead Reckoning, Cruise revved a motorcycle off Norway’s Helsetkopen mountain and turned it into a parachute jump. All of these stunts have required a Herculean amount of planning, preparation, and technical mastery. They’ve also required a ton of Chutzpah.
Now, in his apparent last performance as Ethan Hunt in The Final Reckoning, Cruise notched himself a Guinness World Record for doing 16 burning parachute jumps while filming the insane plane sequence as his Ethan Hunt battles Esai Morales’ Gabriel mid-air in a pair of propeller planes. The stunt was, by definition, highly technical and inherently dangerous, requiring Cruise to make sure the parachute didn’t twist while it was burning, or it could have fried him to a crisp.
Cruise and his stunt coordinator, Wade Eastwood, utilized a “snorri rig” for the stunt, a body-mounted camera that allows viewers to experience a dynamic, first-person point of view of Ethan after he’s leapt from a plane, so that we’re locked in freefall with him in a burning parachute as the world spins around him and the ground rushes up to meet him.
“The action evolves with the story — I’m not trying to invent action just to invent the next big stunt. It’s got to be emotionally engaging through action and fit the character,” Eastwood told us when we interviewed him for the last installment. It speaks to the character-driven action choreography that is at the heart of the franchise. Even though each new installment manages to top the last in terms of breathtaking stunt choreography, the reason the films will stand the test of time is that the stunts serve the story. In this instance, it earned Cruise a Guinness World Record as well.
Check out Cruise’s lunatic stunt here:
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is in theaters now.
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Featured image: Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
