Terrible Marketing Ruined One Of The Most Astonishing Movie Moments Of The Year
Ethan Hunt is out of options. He's ridden a dirtbike to the top of a mountain, and needs to get on a speeding train thousands of feet below. His old pal and tech guru, Benji, essentially tells him just to jump and figure out the rest on the fly. There's only one way he can cover all of that distance in time, and that's to ride the bike off the edge of the mountain, deploy a parachute, and hopefully land on the moving train. Ethan finds a part of the mountain that can serve as a ramp and takes a beat, thinking of the women he's lost and the damage he's wrought. Resolute, he revs the engine and, in one glorious shot that showcases the fact that yep, we're really seeing superstar actor Tom Cruise on the bike and not a stuntman, the camera follows Ethan as he launches out into oblivion and pulls the ripcord.
This scene from "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" should have been a jaw-dropping spectacle, a "holy sh*t, I-can't-believe-they-really-did-this" miracle of action filmmaking.
But thanks to a questionable marketing decision, what could have been one of the best movie moments of 2023 was met with something of a shrug.
Paramount overplayed its hand
I truly feel for the people in Paramount's marketing department. The entertainment world has become so fractured, it's no surprise they thought they needed to lean on the film's biggest stunt to gain attention and convince as many people as possible to pay for a movie ticket. But with hindsight (and again, it's easy for me to say this now), the studio overplayed its hand on this one.
In December of 2022, Paramount released a nine-plus minute featurette dubbing the bike jump "the biggest stunt in cinema history," which explained in forensic detail how this stunt was successfully designed and executed, and every subsequent trailer heavily relied on imagery from the stunt. It's all ridiculously impressive — Cruise really did that! — but the fact that it was detailed so thoroughly before we saw it in context in the movie and then pummeled into prospective audiences at every available opportunity robbed the moment of its "wow" factor in the context of the story. Because of that over-saturation, my brain checked out at the exact moment when the movie should have been hitting its (literal and dramatic) peak.
And anecdotally, at the IMAX location where I saw the film, featurettes about the stunts were literally playing before the movie began, a psychotic decision that lessened the impact of not just this stunt, but several other moments as well.
We spoke about how disappointing the bike jump ended up being (and how another "Dead Reckoning" scene worked much better for us) on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which you can listen to below:
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