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10 hours ago
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It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Tom Cruise jumping out of a helicopter with a fiery parachute!
The Academy Award-nominated actor is now also a two-time Guinness World Records title holder, earning a new title this week for a jaw-dropping stunt performed in his newest movie, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.
Cruise, 62, set the record for “most burning parachute jumps by an individual” on Wednesday. While filming, the actor leapt out of a helicopter 16 times while strapped to a parachute presoaked in fuel and then lit it on fire. Cruise then had seconds to cut himself out of the remnants of the first parachute, before deploying a backup to break his landing.
No other actor or stunt person has come close to that number of drops with a lit parachute, according to Guinness World Records. It’s not clear whether Cruise, who is famous for doing his own stunts, is the first to receive the title for this particular stunt.
“Tom doesn't just play action heroes — he is an action hero!” Craig Glenday, the editor in chief of Guinness World Records, said in a statement. “A large part of his success can be chalked up to his absolute focus on authenticity and pushing the boundaries of what a leading man can do. It's an honour to be able to recognize his utter fearlessness with this new Guinness World Records title.”
This is Cruise’s second Guinness World Records title. In 2024, he was deemed the actor with the “most consecutive $100-million-grossing movies.”
On Thursday, the studio behind the Mission: Impossible franchise released a behind-the-scenes video of the filming of the lit parachute stunt, which includes clips from Cruise’s body camera.
While filming the scene in Drakensberg, South Africa, last year, the team spent weeks planning and preparing the sequence, Guinness World Records explained. The helicopter would take Cruise up to an altitude of at least 7,500 feet before he would jump out, lighting the fuel-soaked parachute on fire and then cutting himself out of it.
“If [the parachute] is twisted while it’s burning, I’m going to be spinning and burning,” Cruise says in the video released by Paramount. “I have to kick it out of the twist and then ignite within 10 seconds.”
The stunt was filmed 16 times, and during some of the jumps, Cruise wore a 50-pound camera rig on his body to capture the fall up close. In the behind-the-scenes video, Cruise consults with the director, Christopher McQuarrie, about which shots to get while wearing the camera.
“We’re going to be real smart,” Cruise tells the crew while sitting on the helicopter in the clip. “I’m not saying be risky. We don’t take risks, obviously.”
It’s certainly not the first time Cruise has performed a daring stunt. In 2011’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, he hung off the side of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building. In 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, he trained to fly his own P-51 Mustang. (Despite being a licensed pilot, Cruise could not fly the F-18 in the movie because of restrictions from the Navy.)
“I feel that [when] acting, you’re bringing everything, you know, physically and emotionally, to a character in a story,” Cruise told Graham Norton in an interview in 2014. “I’ve trained for 30 years doing [stunts] that it allows us to put cameras in places where you normally are not able to.”
Mission: Impossible -—The Final Reckoning was released in theaters throughout the United States on May 23. It has since become the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2025.
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