Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is full of Tom Cruise’s signature stunt work, but the movie also spoiled its biggest stunt.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One ultimately ruined the biggest stunt Tom Cruise filmed for the movie. Unsurprisingly, the seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise came complete with its fair share of on-brand Tom Cruise action. And like most of the movies in the series, it had one in particular that was meant to stand out above the rest.
Dead Reckoning continues Tom Cruise’s predilection for Jackie Chan-levels of insane stunts and action, the movie being packed to the gills with chases, fights, and all manner of death-cheating on Cruise’s part. One of the most prominent stunts comes in the train chase during Dead Reckoning’s ending, in which Ethan Hunt is forced to drive a motorcycle off a cliff in order to parasail his way to the train. While the stunt itself is nothing short of Tom Cruise’s brand of death-defying action, Dead Reckoning’s marketing kept the scene from living up to its potential.
Mission: Impossible 7’s Marketing Showed Too Much Of Tom Cruise’s Cliff Jump
Ethan Hunt’s cliff jump was not merely a significant presence in the trailers and marketing materials for Dead Reckoning, but their arguable centerpiece. Virtually every bit of marketing for Dead Reckoning included footage of Ethan driving his dirt bike up to the cliff side, sailing off, and free-falling before pulling his parachute. While this made the stunt a big money-shot for Dead Reckoning, it also left precious little of it to be shown in the movie itself.
With footage of the movie’s train sequence and Ethan Hunt’s martial arts fight scenes once he is onboard also included in the trailers, the only component of the stunt really left for Dead Reckoning to show would be Ethan maneuvering his parachute to catch up to the train. In the end, Dead Reckoning’s marketing ended up pulling the equivalent of a plot spoiler on Cruise’s biggest stunt in the movie.
Paramount Ruined Mission: Impossible 7’s Cliff Stunt For A Good Reason
By the same token, this was also perhaps a necessary evil to sell Dead Reckoning. With the landscape for movie theaters still rather shaky in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, getting audiences into theaters for a new blockbuster rather than simply waiting for streaming is a harder challenge than it once was. However, as Top Gun: Maverick’s nearly $1.5 billion haul is proof of, Tom Cruise is indeed capable of bringing attention to his films. Cruise’s propensity for performing his own stunts and fight scenes has consistently been shown to translate to box office gold, which makes the presence of Dead Reckoning’s biggest stunt in the movie’s marketing easier to understand.
The footage of Cruise’s cliff jump sells Dead Reckoning as 163 minutes of stunt-filled Tom Cruise-style action, a promise that the movie itself thoroughly delivers on. In the end, Dead Reckoning plays its biggest trump card in pushing the movie’s big cliff jump so heavily in its marketing and in doing so, took away any sense of suspense. Nonetheless, it can afford to do so with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One being the epitome of what a Tom Cruise action movie has to offer.