Tom Cruise's Best 15 Stunts in the Entire <em>Mission: Impossible</em> Franchise

Nobody does it like Tom Cruise, because no one has the guts to do it like him. While Hollywood's last surviving movie star puts in serious effort in virtually all his movies, the Mission: Impossible series has been a showcase for Cruise to flirt with death in the name of pure popcorn entertainment.

From dangling off airplane wings to climbing the world's tallest buildings, to riding motorcycles off cliffs and flying without a parachute, Cruise has entertained audiences while scaring directors stiff and making Paramount's insurance department sweat bullets. But in the end, his efforts are worth it. We forget the latest CGI superhero sequel before its premiere weekend ends, but we never forget Cruise's fearlessness.

With the Mission: Impossible series finally closing its operations for good with Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, let's look back at fifteen stunts where it actually felt like Cruise was almost going to die.

John Woo's Mission: Impossible 2 is commonly seen as the worst of the entire franchise. The film opens with this now-infamous bouldering sequence in Utah. Though completely irrelevant to the plot, it’s memorable for being one of Cruise's most insane stunts. Thankfully, Cruise was connected to a thin safety cable, but he refused to do the climb on a fake small scale cliff or with a safety net. "I was really mad that he wanted to do it, but I tried to stop him and I couldn’t," Woo said. "I was so scared I was sweating. I couldn’t even watch the monitor when we shot it."

In the fifth film, Ethan Hunt is forced to break into a submerged security vault. According to Business Insider, after jumping off a 120-foot ledge, Cruise held his breath underwater for over 6 minutes. "On two or three occasions I brought him up because I felt he was down for too long," said the stunt coordinator on the movie. "He was like, 'What are you doing? I was right in the moment. I'm acting.' And I was like, 'I know, it was just too real for me and I wasn't comfortable.'"

Critics might not have liked the movie, but Woo can film a hell of a chase scene. Mission: Impossible II is best known for this explosive bike chase, during which Cruise does the insane wheelie jump fight.

Brian De Palma’s beloved first entry to the franchise is home to several legendary stunts. The exploding restaurant aquarium scene was created almost completely without digital effects. That's actually Tom Cruise running from sixteen tons of water. Early in this film, director Brian De Palma established the tone for the future of this series.

At this point in the franchise, the stunt crew is more than comfortable putting Cruise in control of the vehicles. After nearly drowning, Hunt chases down a gang of bikers in the streets of Morocco.

Directed by JJ Abrams, Mission: Impossible III gave the series the modern update it needed. Though the missile was CGI, Cruise actually ran full speed and was slammed into that car. And he did it multiple times to ensure perfection.

Perhaps the most iconic sequence in the entire series, most of this stunt was actually performed practically. According to a behind-the-scenes featurette, Cruise was really balancing himself above that floor.

For the sixth film, Cruise became the first actor to ever perform a halo jump, or a high-altitude skydive. What's really bonkers is that this high-risk military maneuver requires an oxygen mask—and since the filmmakers didn't want to cover up Cruise's face during the stunt—they actually invented a prop that kept him alive and showed his face. Cruise had to keep acting during his fall from 25,000 feet in the air until he opened his parachute only 2,000 feet above the ground.

When Cruise asks Hayley Atwell if she's ready, he's not only talking to her. He's talking to all of us, packed in with the two in a tiny yellow Fiat that was custom-built for the production of Dead Reckoning. When the action takes Ethan Hunt and Atwell's hacker Grace to Venice, the handcuffed pair get behind the wheel of a car that seems to have a mind of its own. The action culminates with the car rolling down the Spanish Steps. Months earlier, the lesser franchise sequel Fast X also threw cars down the same steps, but Cruise knew how to put on a real show.

Beauty and horror swirl in a single, heart-stopping few seconds in Fallout. During a most memorable moment in which Cruise's Ethan Hunt tries to hijack a helicopter, the man climbs up using a rope attached to the bottom of the chopper, before positioning himself to its landing gear. While the panoramic views capture the gorgeous beauty of the natural scenery, the intimidating height turns the dream scenery into a potential nightmare.

It doesn't get any simpler than falling from the sky. In The Final Reckoning, just after the buzz-worthy, jaw-dropping plane-to-plane jump, Cruise parachutes out—only for the thing to rip, leaving him in freefall. With a SnorriCam attached to his body, audiences are right there with him, becoming victims of gravity with the world's bravest movie star.

Truly, Cruise saved one of his best for last. In The Final Reckoning, Cruise strapped himself to the wings of a vintage biplane that carves and curves eight thousand feet in the air. While it's one thing to watch Cruise take off on a moving plane, as he did for Rogue Nation, it's another thing entirely to watch him hold on to one. The human body wasn't made to withstand high altitudes and such strong wind velocity! And in the movie, you see Cruise's face ripple like fleshy Jell-O. Next time you're too intimidated to ride a roller-coaster, just remember: Someone has survived much worse.

It's been called the biggest stunt in movie history. Normally, such a claim sounds dubious, but when it's Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible we're talking about, it only makes sense. For the first of two movies meant to cap off the franchise, Cruise dared to ride a motorcycle off a cliff that, while in the air, transitions into a base jump. I'll say it again: It's a motorcycle ride that turns into a base jump. To pull off the stunt required expertise in multiple disciplines, from motorcycle stunts to base jumpers, all of whom instructed Cruise (who, yes, did the stunt himself) into becoming his own action figure.

Rogue Nation’s biggest stunt features Cruise hanging from a real plane as it takes off. Cruise, always committees to authenticity, is said in a featurette to have done the stunt eight times.

In the fourth film, directed by Brad Bird, Ethan Hunt is forced to climb the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on Earth. Of course, since this is Mission: Impossible, they actually filmed Cruise hanging 2,722 feet above the ground. As Cruise later recalled: "Some of the crew couldn’t even go on the floor [of a room where the window had been taken out] just because of the height issue, it was too much for them. When I’m swinging from the building, I have crosswinds, and, when you see the shot, you’ll see that I’m actually flying. I had to figure out how to do that, I’m on a single rope at that point and when I leave the building and catch that wind, I am actually flying and trying to figure out how to move my feet like a rudder to move across the whole arc of the building."