[Update: Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie has now elaborated at length on the extent of the injury (Cruise broke his ankle) and how it will affect the production, all of which you can read below our original story.]
Earlier this week, we learned that Tom Cruise has suffered a serious injury during Mission: Impossible 6. Cruise, who insists on doing his own stunts, leapt from one building and slammed into another, and Deadline reports that it looks like he sustained serious damage to his foot or ankle. Now it looks like the injury is serious enough that production will likely shut down for three months while Cruise heals up. While Deadline claims that production has been shut down for at least nine weeks, Variety is saying that no determination has been made yet.
Cruise has risked injury before, especially with the Mission: Impossible movies that saw him scaling the side of the world’s tallest building and hanging off the side of an airplane. Cruise has stated that he takes these risks because audiences can tell when it’s a stunt person, so he’s willing to risk his personal safety for our entertainment.
What the delay means for Mission: Impossible 6 remains unknown. Shockingly, the biggest beneficiary of this delay could be Warner Bros. You may recall that Paramount refused to let Henry Cavill shave his moustache, but with filming now delayed, it’s possible that Cavill could shave, do his Justice League reshoots, and then grow back that luxurious facial hair when Mission: Impossible 6 picks back up.
That being said, the delay could make life difficult for the co-stars in any situation since they had previously scheduled to move on to other projects and now they’ll need to return to finish filming once Cruise is ready to go. Additionally, Paramount could be facing a double-whammy since they wanted to start filming on Top Gun 2, which was set for release in July 2019.
Mission: Impossible 6 was set to open on July 27, 2018, but with a three-month delay in filming, the movie will almost certainly be pushed back. While it’s a bummer we’ll have to wait a little longer to see it, the most important thing here is that Cruise’s injuries aren’t (as far as we know) life-threatening, he’ll have time to rest up, and the movie will be completed. We wish Cruise a safe and speedy recovery.
Update: Speaking with Empire, McQuarrie confirms that Cruise broke his ankle and is fine, but the film will be taking a production hiatus, although that doesn't mean they'll miss the release date:
"You never stop working. I’m on the backlot at Leavesden right now, getting ready to shoot an insert out in the field. You simply rearrange the order in which you were going to do certain things on the movie. This in fact gives us an opportunity to go into editorial and look at what we’ve shot and reassess the movie, which is a luxury you don’t normally have because you’re on a train that just doesn’t stop.
We’ll assess what there is to be shot. And what we can shoot, and then what we’ll do is once we’ve shot through that we’ll go on a hiatus and then I’ll shift my attention over to editorial. We’ve already shot a huge chunk of the movie so you’re just taking a big chunk of post-production and moving it up sooner. Then we go back to shooting when the hiatus is over, which is to the full benefit of the movie. It’s similar to situations I’ve had on other movies where, for whatever reason, you go on hiatus and you’re able to look at the movie in a way you normally couldn’t and reevaluate. The lesson I learned on Valkyrie, which had its share of difficulties in production, and we always used to say ‘disaster is an opportunity to excel’."
