When it comes to 2025 movie releases, it’s going to be hard to forget the sheer bravery and madness associated with Tom Cruise’s last ride as Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible series. From the actor’s dangerous underwater stunt to literally hanging from the wing of a biplane without a parachute, there’s a lot that could have gone wrong on the set of The Final Reckoning. When director Christopher McQuarrie recently talked about the movie, he shared one key moment from it that he was terrified might not translate on screen.
SPOILERS are ahead for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. You can see the movie in theaters now, and stream the others with a Paramount+ subscription.
At the end of Tom Cruise’s extreme biplane chase scene with Esai Morales’ Gabriel, the villain plans to parachute away, but he suddenly gets killed after accidentally hitting the rudder. It’s one of the most memorable scenes in the movie that inspires a ton of shocked reactions from moviegoers. However, as McQuarrie told Empire, he carried a lot of stress over getting it right. As he shared:
We lived in constant fucking terror of that moment. It was the incredible work of a lot of very talented people to get that thing right, and to make it pay off the way that it does. That was a nail-biter for us, right up until the first proper screening of the finished film in Tokyo with an international audience. Would it work? And when it played in Tokyo, we were like, ‘Okay, it was all worth it. We live to fight another day.'
Now, this makes sense. The bi-plane sequence itself is an incredible feat of stunt work from Tom Cruise, and all involved in choreographing and catching it on camera. McQuarrie has said it was very “physically punishing” for Cruise to hang on the wing of that plane while 8000 feet in the air and with winds as fast as 140 miles per hour.
Yes, the actor had a thin piece of wire that strapped him to the aircraft, but having one of the biggest movie stars accomplish that stunt? The stakes couldn’t have been higher.
So, understandably, it was important for the ending of the sequence to be satisfying to audiences. Ending a massive stunt with a semi-comedic accidental death is a big swing. However, thankfully, McQuarrie realized it does create the “pay off” he wanted for the dangerous stunt after seeing audiences in Tokyo react to it.
Tokyo wasn’t an anomaly; many of Final Reckoning's first screening reactions applauded the film, with one early reaction calling it a “symphony of danger, stakes, tension, and levity”. And, our own Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning review gave the movie a 4 out of 5 for being an “explosive” and “fitting finale.”
Truly, the moment was epic as Ethan worked to take down Gabriel while up in the air and moving between two planes. Then, to have the villain die the way that he did was equal parts shocking and exciting, because it was thrilling to see the bad guy finally go down.
Ultimately, Christopher McQuarrie can rest easy that “it was all worth it” regarding the biplane scene and the decision to top it off with the unexpected and accidental death of Esai Morales’ Gabriel.
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