Mission: Impossible 7 Director Says Tom Cruise’s Most Dangerous Stunt Is Still to Come: ‘It’s Terrifying’

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One director Christopher McQuarrie has teased that, while Tom Cruise’s motorcycle jump stunt is the most dangerous stunt in the film, there is one coming in Part Two that just may be the most “terrifying” one yet.

IGN’s Stella Chung had the chance to speak to McQuarrie at Dead Reckoning’s press junket in Rome about Cruise’s stunts and she asked which one has scared him the most.

“It’s coming,” McQuarrie said. “You haven’t seen it yet. I mean, everything we do… In terms of this movie, definitely the motorcycle jump. But we have continued and we’ve pushed ourselves even further in Part Two, and you’ll see. It’s terrifying.”

For those unfamiliar and not worried about stunt spoilers, the motorcycle jump, which you can watch the making of below, sees Cruise actually riding a motorcycle off an extremely tall cliff in Norway before jumping off it and deploying a parachute. Oh, and Cruise did say back in 2021 that this was the most dangerous thing he’s ever done.

While McQuarrie wasn’t ready to reveal any more about this “terrifying” stunt, he did talk with us a bit further at the film’s red carpet premiere about stunts in general, if they scare him anymore, and how one gets the green light.

“Oh, they all do,” McQuarrie said of these stunts. “They’re all terrible ideas. We have a motto on this movie now: ‘This is a terrible idea – when do we start?’ It never starts with awesome. It starts with, ‘That’s very ill-advised.’ That’s how you know you’re on to something.”

Can’t wait to see those terrible ideas in IMAX. #MissionImpossible pic.twitter.com/Wcw9U1p6CV

— IGN (@IGN) June 24, 2023

Speaking of ill-advised, Cruise himself understands the risks these stunts bring with them and even said he wanted to perform the motorcycle jump stunt on day one just in case it killed him.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will be released in theaters on July 12, 2023, and Part Two will follow on June 28, 2024. For more, check out why Dead Reckoning was split into two parts and our breakdown of the 20 minutes of intense footage from Part One we saw at CinemaCon 2023.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.