You could be forgiven for thinking maybe the wrong franchise was named Death Wish. If anyone else kept wanting to do the Mission: Impossible stunts for real, we might question their sanity. For Tom Cruise, however, it’s Tuesday.

All the trailers for the latest film had implied that the movie’s big stunt sequence would be the one where he’s hanging off of a helicopter, but then at CinemaCon in Vegas, he talked about another one in which he jumped out of a plane 106 times. And it turns out this was no normal jump, but rather a HALO (high altitude, low opening) sky-dive never before performed by an actor. In a just-released featurette, Paramount gives us a taste of the star’s latest manifestation of a need for speed:

It’s not unlike that scene in Speed where a frustrated Sandra Bullock asks Keanu Reeves if he somehow felt he had to create a new challenge for himself. The jump itself isn’t just unprecedented for a newcomer; it also has to be rehearsed in a custom-built wind tunnel, and then filmed over 100 times because the plot calls for it to take place at sunset, allowing only a three-minute window per day. But hey, after Cruise spent five previous movies hanging on to stuff by his fingertips, you wondered when he was going to finally fall, right? He was clearly just waiting for the right moment to make said fall even crazier than actually holding on.

Is this a taste of what we can expect in the Top Gun sequel? Can this be topped in any way? Tell us what you think in comments, and take your time…this message will not self-destruct in five seconds.

Image: Paramount

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