Mission: Impossible 7 suspended production in Italy last month due to the coronavirus outbreak and it was assumed, at least I assumed, that they’d be out indefinitely. Please. Coronavirus can’t keep Tom Cruise down! Filming has now shifted over to England and Tom was seen in Surrey today shooting motorcycle and car scenes. The Daily Mail has the exclusive photos - and I shouldn’t have to tell you, yes, he’s doing his own stunts. WHO ELSE WOULD BE DOING THE STUNTS? Hopefully everyone is taking precautions, both where the vehicles and the virus are concerned. And here I was, just last week, wondering what Tom would do with himself if he couldn’t be on a film set. That’s evidently not an issue. Tom Cruise will always find a way.
But some things are beyond even his control. One of the most highly anticipated cinematic events of 2020 is Top Gun: Maverick, scheduled to open in June. Sarah wrote earlier about how Covid-19 has affected the film industry and that some studios are opting for a day-and-date theatrical and home viewing release. While no one knows whether or not the pandemic will be under control by then, June isn’t so far away, and early publicity for it has already started. Tom and Jerry Bruckheimer were interviewed for the new issue of Empire and, as expected, are bigging up the visuals:
“In the new issue of Empire, Cruise and Bruckheimer talk exclusively about their journey back to Top Gun and rekindling their dynamite creative partnership for Maverick. “We just started talking,” Cruise says. “And I realised that there were things that we could accomplish cinematically. And I started getting excited about this big challenge of, ‘How do we do it?’ So I said to Jerry, ‘I’ll do it if…’ meaning, I’m not going to do the CGI stuff.”
As the film’s trailers have already shown, there’s an even greater physicality and heft to the flight sequences this time around – with the actors, including Cruise himself, taking to the skies for g-force-heavy action sequences. “What’s different about this movie is that [in Top Gun] we put the actors in the F-14s and we couldn’t use one frame of it, except some stuff on Tom, because they all threw up,” laughs Bruckheimer. “It’s hysterical to see their eyes roll back in their heads. So everything was done on a gimbal. But in this movie, Tom wanted to make sure the actors could actually be in the F-18s.”
Cruise made his intentions to pursue practical thrills clear to studio Paramount before the shoot kicked off in earnest. “I said to the studio, ‘You don’t know how hard this movie’s going to be. No-one’s ever done this before,’” the star laughs. “There’s never been an aerial sequence shot this way. I don’t know if there ever will be again, to be honest.”
Of course not. Because there will never be another Tom Cruise. But this brings up an important point where Top Gun is concerned – ideally, you don’t want to see Top Gun: Maverick, and all this aerial g-force sh-t, at home, on your couch. This movie was made to be seen on a big screen, the biggest screen, for the full experience. And it’s a pretty big question mark right now whether or not that’s going to happen. Unless Tom Cruise can somehow find a way to save the day. He could be like a real-life Cuba Gooding Jr in the movie Outbreak, currently one of the most streamed titles on Netflix. You know that character? He can fight, he can do the science, he can fly a helicopter – he did it all! I can still remember sitting in the theatre watching, and I enjoyed the movie, don’t get me wrong, but every five minutes, when Cuba showed off yet another skill, like he was picking them up in a video game, or The Matrix, I was all…seriously, now he’s an epidemiologist too? After a while it became comedy, and I wouldn’t change it for second!