Hollywood legend Tom Cruise has ridden a motorbike off a cliff and performed a base jump in what is being claimed as “the biggest stunt in cinema history”.

Cruise, 60, trained with sky-diving coaches and motocross experts for several months in Britain before filming the death-defying stunt in Norway for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1.

While the film – the seventh in the MI franchise – won’t hit screens until July, Paramount Pictures released an extended 10-minute behind-the-scenes featurette to show how Cruise, director Christopher McQuade and engineers, experts and coaches pulled this somewhat unsurvivable stunt off.

Filmed during COVID, with production stopping seven times, MI’s budget ballooned out to $US290 million budget ($432 million).

And it looks like it was worth every cent.

In footage released on Tuesday, Cruise walks towards a helicopter for base jump practice, looking to the camera and telling his crew: “Don’t be careful. Be confident. Be confident”.

“This is by far the most dangerous thing we’ve ever attempted,” he says.

Just 24 hours earlier, Cruise jumped out of a plane and wished fans a safe and happy holiday season.

While free-falling he said “thank you for allowing us to entertain you”, referencing the success of Top Gun: Maverick.

Fans took to social media to share their amazement:

“This is so insane. Worth a watch until the end. Can’t wait to see the final product … [Cruise] is really pushing the limits and doing stuff that probably no actor before him has ever done,” wrote one.

“I love these movies so much, absolutely what going to the movies to see a blockbuster is all about. Amazing to see how much goes on behind the scenes to get the shot,” wrote another.

“What you do is phenomenal … or should that be crazy?! Either way the stunts look amazing on screen. Thanks Tom!”

Even football fans celebrating Argentina’s World Cup had time to comment, keeping it real: “Tom, this is insane. But you can never do what [Lionel] Messi does”.

‘Masterful’

It’s not the first time Cruise has performed his own stunts.

He flew an F/A 18 fighter jet in Top Gun: Maverick (dealing with G-forces), wore a 58-kilogram armoured suit in Edge of Tomorrow and jumped out of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubaia for MI: Ghost Protocol.

He also performed 106 skydives with a broken ankle to pull off the HALO jump in Mission: Impossible – Fallout.

But that’s nothing compared to this.

Cut to the iconic MI theme music, Cruise says in a voiceover at the start of the clip that the stunt – filmed in September 2020 in Hellesvlt, Norway – has been in the planning “for years”.

Cruise says he’s been wanting to do it since he was a kid, and it all comes down to one thing: giving the audience a “thrill”.

McQuarrie said Cruise put together “a masterful plan” to coordinate experts to make the historic sequence work.

Stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood revealed Cruise did a year’s worth of base training, advance sky-dive training and canopy skills.

“We drilled, and drilled and drilled,” he said.

All up, Cruise did 30 (fixed wing) jumps a day and 500 sky dives.

A motor cross track and replica ramp were built inside a quarry in England for part two of the training so he could accurately simulate the jump and work in lock step with the camera operators.

How many motor cross jumps? 13,000.

When it came to filming the stunt in Norway, it was down to Cruise alone to make it work.

Otherwise, he risked serious injury or death.

With McQuarrie (staring, open-mouthed) and crews watching every second on monitors from an adjacent mountain studio set-up after Cruise rides off the ramp, there’s an agonising pause.

“I saw a canopy, I saw a canopy,” the crew eventually yelled, as one grabs McQuarrie for a celebratory hug.

How many times did he perform this sequence?

“Pretty much the biggest stunt in cinema history … Tom Cruise just rode a motorcycle off a cliff six times today,” said base-jump coach John DeVore.

Back to reality – Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Henry Czerny, Vanessa Kirby and Frederick Schmidt also reprise their MI roles, but none with as much reckoning.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Park One is in cinemas on July 13, 2023