Paramount Pictures is ready for its comeback story. And one film that is likely destined for box office success in the more immediate future is Mission: Impossible — Fallout, the sixth film in the Tom Cruise-anchored franchise, which have made over $2.7 billion (Dh9.9 billion) worldwide.
Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie (who he calls McQ) made an appearance at Wednesday’s CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas to close out the presentation with a look inside one of the film’s most dangerous stunts — a free fall, at speeds ranging from 209 to 321 km per hour, from an airplane at 7,620 metres. It’s a technique, McQuarrie said, that special forces use for infiltration.
“How much we can do that is physically possible without killing Tom,” McQuarrie wondered while choreographing the three-minute stunt that they said everyone told them was impossible.
In the end, Cruise did 106 jumps to get three usable takes that will be cut together to make a single three-minute action sequence in the film. CinemaCon audiences got a look at the early footage of Cruise pulling it off.
“We shot this in the UAE,” Cruise said. “We never would have been able to do this anywhere else.”
Later, Cruise’s co-star Simon Pegg joined them on stage and said of Cruise’s preference to do dangerous stunts himself that, “It is a daily stress going to work with him because you don’t know if you’re going to see him tomorrow.”
Mission: Impossible — Fallout, and Cruise’s latest epic stunt, hit theatres in the US on July 27.
Paramount studio chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos also used the stage to announce a sequel to the breakthrough thriller A Quiet Place, and two new Star Trek movies.
“It’s no secret we’ve had some difficult years at the box office,” said Gianopulos in his first presentation as the studio chair to the CinemaCon attendees. For the past few years, the studio has trailed behind the other major Hollywood studios in box office returns.
He said the studio has made significant changes in leadership and production and is ready to get back to a narrative of success and that A Quiet Place is “the first of what we hope will be many future hits.”
The John Krasinski-directed thriller has earned over $135 million from North American theatres in just three weeks. It cost only $17 million to produce.
The studio teased a lineup heavy with familiar brands, including the Transformers spinoff Bumblebee, with Hailee Steinfeld, a new Cloverfield sequel, several Star Trek movies, their Terminator project, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton, a Sonic the Hedgehog movie, a World War Z sequel, a Dungeons and Dragons movie and a new Spongebob Squarepants.
Save for Bumblebee: The Movie which comes out in December, most of the projects are years from release.
