‘We have to kill off the whole team’: The inside story of how Tom Cruise and Brian de Palma made Mission: Impossible

As the new ‘Mission: Impossible’ film ‘Dead Reckoning’ prepares to hit cinemas, Geoffrey Macnab looks back at how Tom Cruise and a run of celebrated directors transformed a Sixties TV series into a blockbuster franchise

Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in the first ‘Mission: Impossible’ film in 1996 (Christian Black © 2023 Paramount Pictures)

You may well have seen the stunt already: Tom Cruise on a motorbike driving headlong off a cliff into a valley somewhere in Norway and then, a few nerve-wracking moments later, he finally opens his parachute. As his bike plummets toward the rocks below, he soars upward. Paramount leaked the video six months ago to whet appetites for the release of Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, out on Monday (10 July). Cruise has called it the most spectacular stunt in the movie and “the most dangerous thing he has ever attempted”.

It is 27 years since the first Mission Impossible film was released in 1996 and Cruise is still playing the daredevil hero, Ethan Hunt. That is durability off the scale; if he lived in London, Cruise, who is now 60, would qualify for free bus travel – but he’s still performing his own hell-raising stunts. As a point of comparison, between 1962, when the first James Bond feature Dr No appeared, and 1989, the year of Licence to Kill, four different actors – Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton – had already appeared as 007 and a fifth (Pierce Brosnan) was about to take over the role.

The 1996 feature was pivotal in Cruise’s career – his first out-and-out action movie. It was also the debut movie from his company Cruise/Wagner Productions, which he ran with producer Paula Wagner. It was the moment the juvenile star of Risky Business (1983) and Top Gun (1986) grew up. He was involved in every aspect of the production and deferred his own salary to ensure it came in on budget.