New 'Mission Impossible: Fallout' footage released online

Half-hour long clip includes extensive footage of Tom Cruise's Abu Dhabi stunt

A screenshot from the behind-the-scenes video from Mission Impossible 2: Fall Out. 

New behind-the-scenes footage from the set of Mission Impossible: Fallout has surfaced online. The exact source of the extensive half-hour of B-roll footage, which has been posted to the YouTube channel Flix and the City, isn't clear, but it gives us a lengthy look at Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill and Christopher McQuarry at work on set.

Flix and the City identifies the clip as "bloopers," though to be honest there are few bloopers in evidence, thankfully since the clip is heavy on dramatic stunt footage. Stunts featured in the footage include Cruise racing a motorbike through the streets of Paris pursued by police, without a helmet; hanging from the side of a helicopter, and performing the terrifying-looking free fall he performed from a military aircraft over the Abu Dhabi desert.

Cruise performed the HALO jump (which stands for High Altitude, Low Opening) over the dunes back in March. The stunt required him to jump out of a plane at 7,600 metres over the desert, and wait until he was below 600m to pull his parachute open. It took more than 100 jumps to film the final take, as it had to be filmed as close to sunset as possible, giving the crew just three minutes a day to try and get the perfect shot.

The stunt was a year in the planning, and filmmakers had to commission one of the world’s largest wind tunnels so Cruise could practice on the ground first.

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Each time he made the jump, Cruise had to spend 20 minutes breathing pure oxygen to ensure he did not get decompression sickness on the descent. And he had to position himself so he landed exactly a metre away from the camera as he jumped out.

Cruise, who famously performs all his own stunts, has described the Abu Dhabi act of daring as “one of [my] most dangerous stunts yet.”

Mission Impossible: Fallout opens in UAE cinemas on Thursday, June 26