It’s been a bad week for injuries on big movie sets. Two major films have been hit with on-set accidents, with Deadpool 2 actually having a fatality when Stunt Person, Joi “SJ” Harris died during a motorcycle stunt gone wrong. Meanwhile, Tom Cruise was much luckier on the set of Mission: Impossible 6, where he broke his ankle while doing a stunt that involved him jumping from one building to another.
While he’s definitely lucky to only have suffered a broken ankle, it is definitely hard to film an action blockbuster on one foot. To that end, the film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie has now spoken to Empire magazine to announce that the film’s production will go on a short hiatus while Cruise heals up, but the movie is not in danger of missing its 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’.”