The Mission: Impossible movies raise the bar, much like Fast and Furious. First, Tom Cruise climbs the Burj Khalifa. Next, he hangs from an airplane's side, and then he dives out of the airplane at a height that is higher than humanly possible. Mission: Impossible 7 is due for release on May 27, 2022.
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Expositor were treated to a 10-minute video about Cruise's latest stunt during Paramounts presentation at CinemaCon 2021. Cruise will drive a motorcycle from a cliff and jump off it in mid-air. He then freefalls for a few seconds before he parachutes to the bottom. This is Tom Cruise, it's true. He's not a stuntman. He had to train and practice a lot in order to pull it off.
Cruise did approximately 500 skydives in a year. Sometimes, Cruise would do 30 skydives in a single day. Cruise also completed 13,000 motocross jumps using a specially designed track. Cruise became a master of parachuting and base jumping. To pull off the stunt, Cruise would need to be able to do all of these things.
It's not enough to just do the stunt. Director Christopher McQuarrie needed to capture the moment with his team. McQuarrie was training Cruise, so he and his team were trying out new cameras and lenses as well as new technologies and drones in order to capture the moment as close as possible. If the audience isn't going to be able to watch Cruise perform the stunt, you don't need to have him train for a year. McQuarries also created a model of Cruise's ramp, which would be used in a quarry. Cruise then ran simulations using a GPS chip. They were able to predict and calculate all possible trajectories Cruise could take, as well as where Cruise would land.
The actual ramp was built in Norway. It had to be transported by helicopter to this remote location. Months of preparation and construction led to Day 1 of Mission: Impossible 7. This was when the film's biggest stunt would be completed. Here's a picture of the ramp.
As you can see, the preparation and training paid off on that fateful day. Cruise pulled the stunt off not once, not twice, but six times. Each time he tried to hold on to the bike longer, pull his parachuta a little later and make it more dramatic and thrilling.
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McQuarrie stated that the only thing scarier than doing what his team considered the most difficult stunt in film history was what they had planned to do for Mission: Impossible 8.
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