Tom Cruise Has Been Training For His Next 'Mission Impossible' Stunt For A Year. Let's Speculate Wildly!

By Petr Navovy | Think Pieces | March 21, 2017 |

By Petr Navovy | Think Pieces | March 21, 2017 |

This crazy motherfucker again.

There’s a moment in John Wick—the first, great one, not the lumbering golem of disappointment that is the sequel—where the Big Bad, Viggo, goes on a barely-contained rant to his son, explaining to his squirming beseeching little face why it’s such a big deal that it happened to be John Wick who had just been a victim of his cruel stupidity. Among all the penceel-stabbing and Baba Yaga talk that everyone deservedly quotes to this day there is a more subtle line in that delicious upbraiding that describes why Mr. Wick is such a force to be reckoned with.

‘John is a man of focus, commitment, sheer will…’

Now, say what you will about Tom Cruise—and there is a lot to say about Tom Cruise—

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—but man does the man focus on, commit to, and just straight up will his way through action spectacles that actors half his age would balk at.

Did you know that in order to learn how to channel the appropriate intensity for this scene in A Few Good Men he actually dislodged his eyeballs and went without juith for a whole month:

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(Jack Nicholson, that pro, didn’t need to go method. He just yanked a few white lines up his nose-holes before the take and badda-bing-badda-boom, Bob’s your uncle, fuhgeddaboudit, scene!)

But we’re talking about bigger things here than just juith. Because ol’ Tommy Cruise? He loves getting hands on involved. That’s right, The Cruise Control loves doing him some stunts!

Especially in the stalwart, reliable, hard-working Mission Impossible franchise. There, famously, no stunt will go un-Cruised. He’ll do it all!

Cable dangling!

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Plane dangling!

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Burj-dangle-running!

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This thing!

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Shit, the bugfuck insane Cruise held his breath for SIX GODDAMN MINUTES in an underwater stunt in the last Mission Impossible. Just CGI that shit, man! You had the killer whales massing their defence force beyond the beaches, thinking they were gonna need to put up a fight to stop us trying to reclaim—and fuck up—our old aquatic habitats.

Now Collider is reporting that Tom Cruise has been in training for the next big Mission Impossible stunt. For a year.

Or, as writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie, clarified:

To be clear: it's a SEQUENCE Cruise has spent a year training for. Not a stunt.

The stunts are a hobby.

— ChristopherMcQuarrie (@chrismcquarrie) March 20, 2017

A hobby. Of course. Some of us like to play the guitar. Some of us sit barefoot atop the tallest building in the world. Poh-tae-toh, puh-tah-toh.

Actual details about this upcoming stunt are basically nonexistent at the moment, but you know it’s probably gonna be Xenu-flippingly insane. So what better fun than to speculate the shit out of it! What is Tom Cruise gonna do? How is he gonna up the Dangle Quotient?

Will he…

Actually drive a car, that’s actually on fire, through the busy streets of actual London, for five minutes—but while hanging off the side of the car? (7 Cruise Dangle Units)

Strap himself in to a rocket bound for low Earth orbit, detaching somewhere in the middle mesosphere and then plummeting back to terra firma, outspread arms and tiny improvised parachute the only thing eventually stopping him from becoming an everlasting, hole-in-the-ground-style monument to the hubris of man and the passing age of Movie Stars? (9 CDU’s)

Bravely dangle off the back of an SUV that’s making its way through a furious North American storm, a Lord Castleton and a Dustin safely ensconced inside, enduring the impacts of the remnants of beverages that they throw out of their windows as well as the strains of their arguments from within? (OVER 9,000 CDU’s!!!)

No, sorry, I went too far, didn’t I? There’s only so much a human being can actually endure.

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Maybe we’ll just go with Reddit user Naberius’s suggestion instead:

“We’re going to blow Tom up,” said Ellison. “We’re going to literally blow him up with explosives, and then Jeremy Renner will put him back together. We’ve been working on the reassembly time and we’ve got it down to three minutes and six seconds. We’re aiming for sub-three minutes by the time shooting begins. But for those three minutes, he will be dead. We’re going to literally kill Tom Cruise on camera and then put him back together. It’s going to be mind-blowing.”

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Petr Knava lives in London and plays music