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‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ director says the movie has ‘the most difficult thing we’ve ever done’

The director also offered details of a test screening where someone had a pretty severe reaction to the sequence.

The Mission: Impossible movies are known at this point for including at least one death-defying stunt from star Tom Cruise. Cruise seems hellbent on putting his life in danger for the benefit of audiences, and thus far, that dedication has led to some pretty excellent movies.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning may or may not be the final installment in the franchise, but director Christopher McQuarrie is already suggesting that the movie has one of the biggest stunts in the franchise’s history. In speaking with Empire (per GamesRadar), he said that the film contains “the most difficult thing” they’ve ever done with the series. Unfortunately, he didn’t go into detail about what the sequence involved.

McQuarrie did detail a test screening, though, and the sequence went over exactly the way he had hoped. “We had a small screening and someone said, ‘I was suffocating throughout the entire sequence. I almost had a heart attack.’ And I thought, ‘I guess we did something right,” he explained.

The Final Reckoning is set to pick up many of the plot threads that were left dangling in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, as Cruise’s Ethan Hunt faces off against the artificial intelligence known as The Entity. The first trailer for the new film suggests that Cruise will hang off of at least one plane, fight plenty of bad guys, and also do something daring underwater. While we don’t know which sequence was the most difficult, it’s safe to say the movie will contain plenty of stunts.

The Final Reckoning is set to hit theaters on May 23, 2025.

Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.

https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911

YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.

What is AV2, and why should viewers care?

YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.

YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.