When Tom Cruise makes a Mission: Impossible movie there is always at least one extreme stunt that the actor is going to subject himself t in order to blow the audience away. There’s going to be something that we’ve never seen before. However, when we see Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part Two next year, there will be at least one thing that Tom Cruise fans will have seen before, as the film is borrowing a page from Top Gun and filming on an aircraft carrier.
Variety reports that production on the eighth Mission: Impossible film has moved to an aircraft carrier, believed to be the U.S.S. GeorgeH.W. Bush. Cruise reportedly flew into the Italian city of Bari and spent the night there before boarding a helicopter to take him to the carrier to shoot scenes. The aircraft carrier was just off the coast, but has been traveling toward Croatia since Cruise arrived.
While Top Gun: Maverick didn’t spend a great deal of time on camera on board aircraft carriers, that is where large portions of the training that the Top Gun actors went through took place. Everybody spent months being put through their paces so that filming for Maveirck could actually be done in the air. So Cruise likely knows his way around an aircraft carrier better than most who have never been in the Navy.
Mission: Impossible 8 has been largely kept under wraps, likely because at this point nobody has seen Mission: Impossible 7 yet, and therefore every detail is a potential spoiler. Anything we learn about what’s going on with the second movie could reveal something about what happens first, and Paramount wants to make sure we all go to the theater.
As such, it’s anybody’s guess why Ethan Hunt will find himself on board an aircraft carrier in the film. In the plot, the ship could be anywhere in the world. The location could be a major location where lots of things happen, or simply a stop on the way, transporting Ethan from one major location to the next so Cruise can hang from an airplane.
The only thing we can probably guess is that they won’t worry about putting Tom Cruise in a fighter jet to fly around, because he’s totally done that already. But who knows? We haven’t actually seen fighter jet dogfighting in the Mission: Impossible franchise and that series could almost certainly find a way to put a fresh spin on it to make it feel like something very different than Top Gun.
Perhaps, after we all get a chance to see Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One in July we’ll get enough details to start to put some of the pieces of Part Two together.
