Yesterday I posted about Tom Cruise jumping out of an airplane and falling through the sky while delivering a thank you and happy holidays message and promoting Top Gun: Maverick on streaming and on its Oscar campaign. Today I’m back, because he’s back, and instead of jumping out of a plane, he’s riding a motorcycle off a cliff and I don’t know why he’s decided to make me sh-t myself from fear this week but here we are. 

 

This is a nine minute video but, true to form, every second of it is high-adrenaline entertainment, the kind only Tom Cruise can deliver. Tom’s Christmas present to the world appears to be a behind-the-scenes featurette about the making of the marquee stunt scene in the upcoming Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1. First of all, it’s the inside baseball level of production here as you can see how Tom and his team put together the moment. They built an enormous ramp for him to ride off the cliff, and it’s also the coordination of the cameras because there’s no point in doing this if you can't shoot it from every angle. 

In order to make it happen, though, it requires practice – so before we even get to the real thing, we’re taken to the practice facility where they’ve built the model for Tom to practice on and for Chris McQuarrie, his director, to figure out the filming angles. 

But practice also involves Tom’s training. He skydives 30 times a day for a total of 500 or more skydives to get comfortable. And then on the bike he did over 13,000 motocross jumps. 

 

FIVE HUNDRED and THIRTEEN THOUSAND…

Is this man OK? 

Like is that even good for your body to be falling from the sky like that over and over again and the impact on his body from all that sh-t he’s doing on the bike?!

You will note though – he’s doing it for you, for me, for all of us. As you can hear from the video, Tom’s constantly like… how can we bring the audience into this, how can the viewer appreciate what’s happening, how can we deliver maximum entertainment. 

“ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?”

This is a line that belongs to Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator played by Russell Crowe but it really applies to Tom Cruise in Hollywood, because he will stop at nothing, literally nothing, to entertain. So my very boring next question is… 

 

Is he insured?! 

As legend would have it, he has fired insurance companies before that refused to insure him – at least that’s what they said for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol when he dangled from that building. He got rid of one company in favour of another that would insure him. Tom Holland wasn't even allowed to go snowboarding when he was doing Spider-Man… 

Can you imagine what Tom’s insurer is thinking when he keeps ratcheting up the crazy with these stunts? 

As for the timing of all of this, Dead Reckoning Part 1 comes out in July 2023 so he still has months and months to go before he needed to promote this movie. They’re showing all of this now, though, sure, to increase anticipation but it’s also in service of Top Gun: Maverick – a reminder to the industry and the Oscar voters that these are the lengths Tom Cruise will go to to make a great movie. 

 

There are over 240K likes on this post now. Tom has gone back-to-back viral with his social media engagements this week. Only he can run an Oscar campaign like this.