Tom Cruise wows fans with new details, footage of Mission Impossible stunt

Tom Cruise debuted footage of a new high-stakes stunt from Mission: Impossibel - Fallout, the sixth film in the action-adventure series.

Tom Cruise regaled CinemaCon Wednesday with a demonstration of his renowned stuntman skills, as Paramount and Universal built buzz for their upcoming slates of blockbusters. Appearing in Las Vegas to introduce Mission: Impossible - Fallout, the upcoming sixth movie in Paramount’s long-running spy franchise, Cruise took up the last half-hour to explain the movie’s marquee death-defying stunt.

Tom Cruise, star of the upcoming film Mission: Impossible - Fallout, addresses the audience during the Paramount Pictures presentation at CinemaCon 2018.(Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

The scene -- replayed from several angles for the CinemaCon crowd in Las Vegas -- involved a 220 mile-an-hour (340 kph) “halo” (“high altitude, low open”) skydive during which he grabs Henry Cavill’s character in mid-air.

I've always wanted to do a sequence like this. Here's a look at the helicopter stunt from #MissionImpossible. pic.twitter.com/C1cXFPiBZV

— Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) February 7, 2018

Cruise, a 55-year-old veteran of more than 50 movies who broke his ankle during another of the film’s stunts, simulates going into a spin when he is hit by lightning almost immediately after leaping out of his plane at around 30,000 feet.

“This movie, it is without a doubt the most epic Mission that we’ve made and it’s a film that is adventurous, it’s emotional, and it’s really cutting-edge,” Cruise told AFP backstage at Caesar’s Palace.

WATCH | Tom Cruise breaks his ankle in excruciating detail in Mission: Impossible 6 behind-the-scenes footage
READ | Mission Impossible Fallout behind-the-scenes: Tom Cruise flies his own helicopter, shoots the film’s biggest stunt

Long admired for performing his own increasingly ambitious stunts, Cruise said it took 106 jumps to get the three takes required, filmed partly by a cameraman falling backward out of the plane.

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