Cruise on a ‘Mission’: 25,000 feet, 106 times
LAS VEGAS – Tom Cruise has put his dangerous falling out into Mission: Impossible — Fallout.
The action star, 55, wowed CinemaCon last week with stunning footage of his high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) parachute jump stunts for the action thriller (in theaters July 27).
The numbers alone for the stunt, which took more than a year to plan and execute, are daunting. Cruise’s jump required an extended free fall — used by military special operators — from 25,000 to 30,000 feet, flying through the air at speeds up to 220 mph with the aid of an oxygen mask.
Between training for the stunt and shooting, Cruise jumped from a C-17 military plane 106 times to get the three takes he and director Christopher McQuarrie wanted.
“For these films, it’s about what we can do that’s physically possible, but without killing Tom,” McQuarrie said.
McQuarrie joked that it didn’t make sense “falling out of a perfectly functioning aircraft.” But that is what Cruise does for his Mission: Impossible franchise, including strapping himself to an Airbus A400 turboprop in-flight for 2015’s Rogue Nation.
McQuarrie’s team developed an oxygen mask that would allow Cruise’s face to be lit and not obscured by the protruding hose — so audiences will see for themselves it’s actually Cruise jumping.
A camera operator using a helmet camera followed Cruise in the scene and fell backward from the plane just before Cruise, keeping the close-up intact.
After the dramatic footage was shown, Mission: Impossible star Simon Pegg put it in perspective for the applauding audience. “The difference is, you know he lived,” said Pegg, insisting he once truly thought Cruise had perished in a stunt. “It’s a daily stress going to work with him. You don’t know if you’ll see him tomorrow.”
In other Paramount Studios news:
Buzzing about ‘Bumblebee’
Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena and director Travis Knight revealed footage from the Transformers spinoff Bumblebee (Dec. 21). In the first film without Michael Bay, Knight promised he would continue the Transformer tradition of “spectacle and explosion, lots and lots of explosions.” But he also promised an “emotional core.” The first footage did show Steinfeld’s teenage Charlie meeting the painfully shy but powerful Autobot and naming it Bumblebee because of the buzzing sound it made. (Bumblebee can’t speak.) “And (the name) matches the outfit,” Charlie says of the yellow-and-black creature.
The sequels are coming
Paramount CEO Jim Gianopulos announced that a sequel for John Krasinski’s thriller A Quiet Place ($235 million in worldwide box office and counting) is already in the works. Two Star Trek movies also are on tap, he said.