Hollywood legend Tom Cruise has officially bagged a Guinness World Record for taking the most scorching parachute leaps ever made by a person — a mind-blowing 16 times — all throughout the course of his latest blockbuster, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
The adrenaline-rich sequence, which was filmed at the movie's climactic conclusion, features Cruise — an officially qualified skydiver — jumping from a helicopter while wearing a parachute that had been deliberately soaked in airplane fuel and ignited.
Each jump saw him eject the burning canopy in mid-air and deploying a reserve chute to make an unscathed touchdown.
"Tom doesn't merely act action heroes – he is an action hero," said Craig Glenday, Editor-in-Chief at Guinness World Records, in a formal statement on their website. "A great deal of his success can be attributed to his sheer dedication to authenticity and testing the limits of what a top man can do. It is an honour to be able to celebrate his complete lack of fear with this new Guinness World Records title."
In The Final Reckoning, Cruise's Ethan Hunt has a nail-biting fight with villain Gabriel, who is played by Esai Morales, as the two fight for dominance of a superintelligent AI presence on board vintage 1940s biplanes flying high over the Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa.
To film close-up shots while freefalling, certain takes were shot using a 50-pound camera rig attached directly to Cruise, further increasing the technological sophistication of the stunt.
This new world record is the newest honor in Cruise's illustrious career, which boasts several box-office highs like being on top for the most consecutive movies that have grossed more than US$100 million.
Since his breakout in 1983 with Risky Business, Cruise has featured in more than 30 movies, producing blockbuster after blockbuster — from Jack Reacher (2012) to his newest film in 2025.
"Tom is well-known to break records," Glenday continued. "Throughout his remarkably long and durable career, he has established himself as the greatest actor in Hollywood and the most commercially viable star, and he remains the actor with the highest number of consecutive US$100 million films on his CV and the leading action hero at the global box office who has achieved the highest success."
Cruise is now synonymous with outrageous stunts since initially donning the character of Ethan Hunt in Brian De Palma's 1996 Mission: Impossible. With every installment, he has stretched the boundaries of practical filmmaking — from running between rooftops in Mission: Impossible III (2006), climbing up the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol (2011), hanging from a flying plane in Rogue Nation (2015), to driving a motorbike off a cliff in Dead Reckoning (2023).
Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning boasts a star-studded cast that includes Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff, and Angela Bassett, solidifying the franchise's place in film history.
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