It Should Surprise No One That the World Record for Most Skydives With a Flaming Parachute is Held by Tom Cruise
Jamie McCarthy. Getty Images.For all the things Hollywood has been getting wrong for the last decade or so, the film industry is not dead yet. Despite their best efforts to alienate audiences with recycled garbage, reboots, remakes, rebrands, gender-swapped characters, girl bosses and simplistic sociopolitical messages clumsily shoehorned into what used to be escapist fun, there's still a small contingent of the entertainment industry interested in actually producing entertainment. Which has become a novel concept 25 years into this century.
And in that small population of entertainers still trying to entertain, Tom Cruise stands alone. He truly is the last real Movie Star. A throwback to the days when audiences would go to the theater based not on the movie, but the name above the title. A Clint Eastwood movie. A Schwarzenegger movie. A Stallone movie. Tom Cruise movies are the last remaining example of that appeal.
I defy anyone to describe the plot of the last three Mission: Impossible films. All anybody remembers is a good cast, a bunch of exotic locations, someone turning out to be someone other than who you thought they were (or something), and Tom Cruise creating a near death experience for himself in order to move the story along. Or to put it more accurately, risking his life and limb to BE the story. The reason we're all buying theater movie tickets instead of staying home with 100,000 movie options literally at our fingertips.
Of course, that comes at a cost. Cruise is on his eighth and final M:I movie. And since he's already run down the side of the world's tallest building, clung to the side of a cargo plane as it took off, and driven a motorcycle off a cliff, he's in danger of running out of insanely risky ways to spit in the face of certain death. So for this last one, he wasn't content to merely tempt fate, but to do so in record breaking fashion:
Source - Tom Cruise was awarded a Guinness World Record during the production of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” by doing 16 burning parachute jumps while filming the climactic plane sequence. Yes, Cruise jumped to his potential death while his parachute caught fire 16 times during the making of the latest “Mission: Impossible” film. …
“If this is twisted while it’s burning, I’m going to be spinning and burnt. I have to kick out of the twist and then ignite in 10 seconds,” Cruise is heard saying before making one of the jumps. “We’re going to be real smart. I’m not saying be risky. We don’t take risks, obviously.”
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on burning skydives. What I don't know about soaking your parachute in flammable liquid and igniting it while diving out of a perfectly good aircraft could fill a library. But I'm going to go way out on a limb and assume Tom Cruise's Guinness World Record of doing this stunt 16 times was previously held by … Tom Cruise, with 15. In fact, I would hazard to guess he could've held the record with one such jump. Retired the trophy, in fact. Because all the previous attempts at flaming parachute jumps ended on the first try thanks to gravity.
After seeing this, I'm actually going to feel guilty if I don't see this movie. I mean, what does our last true Movie Star have to do to impress us if 16 burning parachutes won't do it? I'm not sure at this point Hollywood is worth saving. But if this won't do it, nothing will. Either way, he'll be doing this for the rest of our lives, since he's obviously immortal.
