While there are a lot of horror films among 2025 movie releases, I have a feeling few will have me holding my breath as much as the upcoming Mission: Impossible - Final Reckoning. As Tom Cruise's co-star, Simon Pegg, recently reminded us all, Cruise does ALL of his own stunts, and they're often jaw-dropping. Given I’m stressed enough seeing them play out on the big screen, I’m amazed about what the movie’s director said about how he has to keep cool while watching them play out in real time.
Christopher McQuarrie, who has helmed the last four Mission: Impossible movies including Final Reckoning, recently shared how bringing these big stunts together creates “a lot of stress.” However, he also admitted to having to check that anxiety at the door when shooting these scenes. As he shared with Deadline:
We had safety protocols on this film that centered around the aerial sequence, which was the first thing we shot for this chapter in terms of action. We would have these briefings before every flight, and they were very, very meticulous, very careful. We went over it many, many times with all the pilots. And at the end of every safety briefing, our safety guy would say, ‘Does anyone have any ducks?’ And a duck was anything in your life that was causing you stress, anxiety that was distracting you. It didn’t matter if it was on the film or outside of the film, if there were three ducks in a safety debriefing, you didn’t fly.
It sounds like those involved in the stunts for Mission: Impossible have to stay really calm and collected in order to accomplish these scenes at all, and McQuarrie had to follow suit. As he continued:
I asked the safety guy, ‘Where does the term duck come from?’ And he said, ‘It’s not the lion that eats you, it’s the thousands of ducks that peck you to death.’ Where accidents happen is when multiple people are distracted by multiple things, it’s never one factor that leads to it. It’s actually a series of factors, a series of distractions.
It’s all about mindset, isn’t it? If you’re stressed out and anxious about something as complicated as Tom Cruise hanging off the wing of a plane while he's 8000 feet in the air with winds blowing as fast as 140 miles per hour, then you probably aren't prepared. (By the way, Cruise actually performs such a plane stunt in Final Reckoning.) With that in mind, it's understandable as to why Christopher McQuarrie has had to ditch his fears. In his words:
And I realized I couldn’t have any ducks at all. I could not be afraid of time. I couldn’t be afraid of the usual pressures of production. I had to be as open-minded as humanly possible, so that I knew I wasn’t overlooking anything.
While this makes perfect sense on paper, it sounds like an impossible mission to have this much mental fortitude on one of the biggest and most high-stakes movie sets ever. The Final Reckoning reportedly cost around $400 million to make (per The Hollywood Reporter), with production delays including the 2023 Hollywood strikes being partially to blame. Those costs make it one of the most expensive movies ever made. And McQuarrie is in the middle of every decision that has to be made from a production standpoint, and it’s wild to think he had to be so calm and collected.
So far, reactions to new Mission: Impossible movie have been mostly positive, with CinemaBlend’s own Jessica Rawden calling it an “anxiety-inducing” “showstopper." In our own four-star Final Reckoning review, Mike Reyes dubs the film a “fitting finale” and says that aside from some “rough edges” it has all the ingredients you want from the franchise. So I'd say that Christopher McQuarrie's fearless direction and approach weren't for nothing. Check out the movie when it hits theaters on May 23.
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