Tom Cruise’s on-set injury forces long ‘Mission: Impossible 6’ production delay

By Stephanie Topacio Long Published August 16, 2017

Mission: Impossible 6 — Featureflash / Shutterstock.com

The fictional Ethan Hunt may be able to consistently pull off the impossible, but the actor who plays him, Tom Cruise, is only human. The action star was shooting Mission: Impossible 6 this week when he suffered a broken ankle during an on-set accident. Production is on hold while he recovers — a process that could take between six weeks and three months, according to Variety sources.

Cruise was filming M:I 6 in London on Sunday when he injured himself. As a TMZ video showed Monday, the actor was trying to jump onto a building from some rigging but didn’t quite make it. He collided hard with the building, which evidently caused his broken ankle.

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Paramount Pictures later confirmed the injury and said production will go on hiatus until the actor recovers. The studio didn’t provide an exact timeline, but Variety’s insiders indicate it could take up to three months for the actor to heal. One source said Cruise’s hip was hurt as well, but it sounds like the broken ankle is the more serious of the injuries.

The good news is that even with the delay in production, Paramount Pictures does not anticipate having to push back the film’s release date.

“Production will go on hiatus while Tom makes a full recovery, and the film remains on schedule to open July 27, 2018,” the studio said in a statement. “Tom wants to thank you all for your concern and support, and [he] can’t wait to share the film with everyone next summer.”

One issue to consider is how the accident will affect Cruise’s future stunt work. The actor has long been known for taking on challenging scenes. An injury like this could dampen his enthusiasm, or perhaps make studios more wary of risking the well-being of a film’s star.

Accidents aren’t as uncommon as we’d like them to be. In fact, there have been multiple serious injuries to stunt people recently, including two tragic deaths — one on the set of Deadpool 2 this week and another on The Walking Dead set in mid-July. Cruise is very lucky indeed that a broken ankle is the worst of his problems.

Mission: Impossible 6 hits theaters July 27, 2018.

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Stephanie Topacio Long

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Stephanie Topacio Long is a writer and editor whose writing interests range from business to books. She also contributes to…

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The best action scenes in the Mission: Impossible movies, ranked

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Since it first arrived on the big screen in 1996, the Mission: Impossible film franchise has thrilled audiences with increasingly ambitious practical stunts. Star and producer Tom Cruise won’t be satisfied until he’s shown gravity who’s boss once and for all, diving off of increasingly high platforms at increasingly deadly speeds. The daredevil feats have become such essential parts of the Mission: Impossible films and their marketing that one could almost forget the stories that these stunts are meant to service.
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7. Stealing the Rabbit’s Foot (Mission: Impossible III)
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Mission: Impossible III gets a bit of a bad rap for its efforts to ground the series in something approaching reality, and it can definitely be argued that director J.J. Abrams’ more TV-style aesthetic was an overcorrection from John Woo’s unrestrained bombast. We’ll stand behind M:I-3’s more human and emotional characterization of Ethan Hunt, the romance subplot, and of course, the outstanding performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the villain, but we do have to admit that the choice to essentially skip this movie’s main heist sequence is pretty disappointing.
In the second act of M:I-3, Ethan’s wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) has been kidnapped by terrorist Owen Davian (Hoffman), who promises to kill her unless Hunt retrieves the mysterious “Rabbit’s Foot” weapon from a secure facility in Shanghai. Hunt goes rogue and, with the help of his team, plans a daring swing between two skyscrapers, using a third, taller building as a fulcrum.
However, while we see Ethan’s leap and his tricky landing on the roof of the facility, we don’t follow him inside for the rest of the heist. Instead, we remain with his teammates Zhen (Maggie Q) and Gorley (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) as they wait to hear whether or not he’s acquired the Rabbits Foot. We only catch up with Ethan once the mission has gone sideways, and Zhen, Gorley, and trusty tech wizard Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) participate in a wild, shaky-cam car chase away from the building’s facility. It’s a cute subversion of the franchise’s usual structure and it allows the plot to continue at an even clip, but for the purposes of this list, we can’t put it anywhere but dead last.

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By most accounts, Dead Reckoning's two-movie adventure will mark the end of Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his time in the Impossible Mission Force. When the ending comes around for Part 1, Ethan's team has been forever changed, and even bigger challenges lie ahead in Part 2. If you need help making sense of it all, then you've come to the right place because we're about to dive in. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to keep reading, preferably after you've already seen Dead Reckoning Part 1.