We are now less than a month away from the release of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1 and you know what that means? It’s time for the Tom Cruise Stunt Narrative. 

 

We should all be familiar with this routine by now? Every Tom Cruise movie involves Tom Cruise doing his own stunts and we have to hear about how those stunts are achieved, how Tom continues to push his own standard of batsh-t risk and you know why? Of course you know why, because he keeps telling us why: it’s for us! 

This is Tom’s motto – he just wants to entertain the audience, he does it all for the audience, to give the audience the best possible experience, to make us feel like we’re right there with him, whether it’s scaling the world’s tallest building or jumping off a cliff or running on top of a train, across a canyon on a suspension bridge, up a mountain and over the valley, whatever the f-ck Tom is running from or wherever it is that he’s running to, he wants us next to him and he’ll do the most to make sure we experience it. 

 

Today’s experience is a car chase through the streets of Rome, which is basic bitch level sh-t, so he’s increasing the degree of difficulty by doing it handcuffed and one-handed. And even though the camera doesn’t necessarily have to capture Tom driving one-handed, he insists on doing the whole thing one-handed because that’s just how committed he is, goddammit. He only works one way! “We’re doing it right!”

Here’s Tom last night in London after a screening. Hayley Atwell was there too. 

 

The junket is happening this weekend in Rome, appropriately, so look out for the spectacle in a few days and also for early reaction to the movie when we’ll really get a sense of how it all plays. Tom’s last movie, of course, was Top Gun: Maverick, a critical and commercial success. So expectations are high for this one – which is why he’s pissed about the IMAX window and Oppenheimer; if he’s going to be doing this much and flinging his body around and driving with one hand, he wants you to see it on the biggest, best, and most expensive screen possible. 

The press tour for Oppenheimer, however, may be affected by a possible actors’ strike. The Mission: Impossible press is happening ahead of the June 30th SAG-AFTRA deadline. If a strike really does happen, the schedule could be an advantage for Tom in that he’s getting out there and doing the promotion before the work stoppage. 

 

We’re about to get a lot of Tom over the next couple of weeks. Not that that will look any different from all the other times he’s done this. Tom will be in several countries in a short amount of time. He might land a helicopter at one of those destinations, or roll up to the carpet on a motorcycle. He will tell us that all he’s ever wanted to do is make movies that we enjoy. And then we’ll go into the theatre and watch him try to die for two hours. The end.