There were a whole lot of breathless reports on Thursday fawning over Tom Cruise’s adrenaline junkie persona after Paramount released special footage of “Mission: Impossible 7” at CinemaCon.
Really? 13,000 motorbike jumps? Did anyone actually do the math on that?
I don’t discredit his willingness to do incredible stunt work in his films. When it comes to performing extreme action sequences, Cruise is the real deal. But let’s just fact-check the fella just this one time, shall we?
So in order to pull off a sequence in “Mission: Impossible 7” in which Cruise rides a motorbike and launches himself off a cliff, he trained for over a year doing 500 skydives and “13,000 motorbike jumps.” They built Cruise a cycle jumping course for him to train on and everything in order for him to practice jumping hills.
Let’s say for argument’s sake that this course had 10 jumps. Seems reasonable enough. That means Cruise allegedly went around this circuit ONE-THOUSAND THREE-HUNDRED times before everyone sitting around pensively stroking their chin decided, “Alright, I think we’re good.”
How many times did Cruise perform the cliff jump on the first day of filming? Six times. He’s obviously going to practice more than he plays, but c’mon. It makes zero sense that Cruise–whose time is as valuable as anyone’s on the planet–is going to spend upwards of a year riding some 13,000 jumps just to do it on film half a dozen times.
Besides, I’ve got proof that you need exactly zero practice to pop a wheelie on a motorbike and do a bit of rad riding. Just ignore the crash at the end, though, because based on the stunt, this dude would’ve been launched off the ramp and in mid-air by that point already:
