I truly feel for the people in Paramount’s marketing department. The entertainment world has become so fractured, it’s no surprise they thought they needed to lean on the film’s biggest stunt to gain attention and convince as many people as possible to pay for a movie ticket. But with hindsight (and again, it’s easy for me to say this now), the studio overplayed its hand on this one.
In December of 2022, Paramount released a nine-plus minute featurette dubbing the bike jump “the biggest stunt in cinema history,” which explained in forensic detail how this stunt was successfully designed and executed, and every subsequent trailer heavily relied on imagery from the stunt. It’s all ridiculously impressive — Cruise really did that! — but the fact that it was detailed so thoroughly before we saw it in context in the movie and then pummeled into prospective audiences at every available opportunity robbed the moment of its “wow” factor in the context of the story. Because of that over-saturation, my brain checked out at the exact moment when the movie should have been hitting its (literal and dramatic) peak.
And anecdotally, at the IMAX location where I saw the film, featurettes about the stunts were literally playing before the movie began, a psychotic decision that lessened the impact of not just this stunt, but several other moments as well.
We spoke about how disappointing the bike jump ended up being (and how another “Dead Reckoning” scene worked much better for us) on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which you can listen to below:
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