The tenth biggest box office hit of 2025 so far, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning premieres on Showmax on Wednesday, 17 December, and screens on M-Net (DStv 101) at 8 PM on Sunday, 28 December.
The final instalment in the franchise sends Ethan Hunt (four-time Oscar nominee Tom Cruise) after The Entity, a rogue AI system.
The Final Reckoning was partly shot in South Africa with Moonlighting Films. This included a wild, 15-minute biplane chase sequence, using Mpumalanga’s Blyde River Canyon for the opening flight, KwaZulu-Natal’s Drakensberg for the mid-air plane-to-plane transfer and wing-walking, and the Wild Coast for the climactic cockpit fight.
“That sequence is like Top Gun meets Mission: Impossible – the best of both worlds,” says Durban-born stunt coordinator and second-unit director Wade Eastwood, who recommended the locations. Eastwood has been a core member of the MI team since Rogue Nation, winning multiple stunt awards.
Before filming, Cruise and the stunt pilots trained at Duxford Airfield in Cambridgeshire, learning to handle the production’s four modified 1940s Stearman biplanes, rigged with cameras and reinforced for wing work. Once in South Africa, the team completed around 4 000 flights while perfecting the choreography, according to editor Eddie Hamilton.
“McQ and I didn’t know until we got to South Africa what was going to work,” Cruise says, referring to Oscar-winning director Christopher McQuarrie. “I knew I could do loops and rolls and hammer heads. Now I wanted to make sure I could explore and go Zero G out on the wing and travel along their fuselage … The only way you can do this is by building a programme that you move step by step through to build a level of skill and competency, without stepping over any boundaries that you cannot recover from.”
The physical toll on Cruise – who was over 60 at the time – was immense. “I did heavy, heavy weights for this movie, and very different nutrition,” he says. “The forces I was dealing with when I was hanging on the fuselage and trying to get my foot up on the wing was like doing the heaviest squat in your life … I was slamming back and forth on the aeroplane. I was worried about the fuselage. I was worried about me going through the wing, because it was fabric. I had to protect myself, so I didn’t get knocked out, because I didn’t have a helmet on. Some of the forces were so tremendous that at times I couldn’t move.”
Eastwood adds, “You know when you put your hand out of the car window, and you feel the forces on your hand? Now imagine putting your whole body out the window and pushing against hurricane force winds, because that’s what he was doing … He’d come slamming down onto the wing and lose all his air and be clinging on for his life, before continuing the action.”
McQuarrie admits he had to “purge stress” to manage the risks. “By the time I’m in Africa, I simply cannot have any sort of emotional distress or worry, or someone could die,” he told his wife before filming.
He later joined Cruise in the air to oversee shots directly: “When you see Tom flying through that canyon, five feet off the water, we’re in a helicopter just lower than him so I can see him under the wing when it’s almost brushing the rocks.”
He says communication was only possible by flying up beside Cruise’s plane, opening the helicopter door at 10 000 feet and stepping onto the skid so Cruise could see him.
Of course, because this is Mission: Impossible, Ethan Hunt doesn’t land the plane – he jumps from it.
The production created a burning-parachute sequence over the Drakensberg, with Cruise leaping from a helicopter more than two kilometres above ground. It’s cut in the film to appear as though he jumps from the biplane.
The main parachute, soaked in a specialised fuel, ignites mid-fall as Hunt spirals out of control. Wearing a lightweight Snorricam rig, Cruise had just two-point-five to three seconds to film his point-of-view shots of the burning canopy before it disintegrated and he had to deploy his reserve chute.
“There’s no way you could have gotten those shots without that camera on me,” he says proudly. “They’re a very unique point of view.”
McQuarrie recalls feeling sick after Cruise’s first attempt, only for the actor to insist on repeating it another 15 times. “He wanted to do one more and that’s when I said no. I was like, ‘Do not anger the gods. We have what we need.’”
The stunt has since been recognised by Guinness World Records for the “most burning parachute jumps by an individual.”
For Cruise, it’s all for the audience. “One of our favourite lines is when someone says, ‘I bought the whole seat but only used the edge,’” he says. “That is what I want.”
Final Reckoning won Best Action Movie and Best Actor: Action at the 2025 Critics’ Choice Super Awards, while The New York Times praised it as “blockbuster entertainment at its most highly polished.”
Mission accomplished, then.
Watch the trailer, which has over 27 million views:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
See Paramount’s behind-the-scenes feature on the Biplane transfer stunt: https://youtu.be/KJsY1uh5bXg?
See Paramount’s behind-the-scenes feature on the burning parachute stunt: https://youtu.be/K5PP7igejMU?
While you wait, binge the entire Mission: Impossible franchise on Showmax.