Tom Cruise and his crew held their first press conference to launch the eighth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, The Final Reckoning, in Tokyo, Japan on May 6. Following the success of the previous installments, in this comeback, he performed many dangerous action scenes himself, both in the air and underwater.
One of the most challenging scenes was Tom Cruise swinging on the wing of a Boeing-Stearman at a speed of more than 200 km/h, over 2,400 m high. The crew spent many years planning the scene. At the same time, the actor regularly attended many technical training courses, practicing breathing to combat wind resistance. During training, he once fainted due to lack of oxygen and the impact of G-force (the relative acceleration of an object compared to free fall), and could not enter the cockpit.
The underwater scene was filmed in an 8.5 million liter tank. The crew also built gimbals to film in this environment, calculating the oxygen and carbon dioxide accumulation. Tom Cruise had to wear a mask, a glowing helmet and a special diving suit, weighing up to 68 kg. However, he could only wear the oxygen supply device for 10 minutes.
During filming, he and director Christopher McQuarrie communicated using hand signals, and the technical team was always on duty to ensure absolute safety. “We always strive to overcome our limits, hone our skills to bring the audience truly emotional and spectacular entertainment moments,” said Tom Cruise.
Tom Cruise, 63, is 1.7 m tall and weighs about 68 kg. The actor is known as the “ageless man” in Hollywood, his appearance has not changed much over time. According to SCMP, he is the highest-paid actor in the world in 2022, in the film industry alone. The artist does not use social media and rarely shares about his personal life since his tumultuous divorce with Katie Holmes in 2012.
The Mission: Impossible brand is a famous American intelligence television series, aired from 1966-1973, 1988-1989. In 1996, director Brian De Palma decided to bring the story of the intelligence organization Impossible Mission Force (IMF) to the big screen. To date, seven films have earned more than four billion USD, making it the 17th highest-grossing film series in the history of world cinema.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning continues the events of the seventh part, Dead Reckoning Part One (2023). At this time, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is on a mission to prevent assassin Gabriel (Esai Morales) from obtaining an artificial intelligence program called “Entity”, which holds all the knowledge humans have ever known, including top secret information of intelligence agents. According to Variety, the project has a budget of nearly 400 million USD, promising to bring a blockbuster that meets both technical and content quality.