Mission: Impossible - Fallout cut multiple major action sequences from the trailers. Considering that the latest entry in Tom Cruise's action franchise comes in just under two-and-a-half hours and features some of the most extreme stunts of the actor's career, you'd expect little of the film to have been left on the cutting room floor. In reality, quite a lot didn't make it.
The Mission: Impossible movies challenge a lot of accepted approaches to the modern tentpole filmmaking. Obviously, Cruise's propensity to perform his own, death-defying stunts make the series different to standard CGI bombast, and there's overall been a shirking of grand continuity in the age of the shared universe. Although the biggest may be the least obvious from the finished product: Mission: Impossible - Fallout started shooting without a script. Per writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, "there was an outline" but the specifics of the film - which delves deep into Ethan Hunt in a very delicate manner - was constructed as they went along.
Related: Mission: Impossible - Fallout's Ending: The Reframing Of Ethan Hunt Explained
This freeform moviemaking can be seen best in what isn't in the released film; Mission: Impossible - Fallout had multiple key sequences from the trailers seemingly cut in their entirety. Here, we're going to explore these deleted scenes and explain why they didn't make it.
- This Page: Mission: Impossible - Fallout's Three Deleted Action Scenes
- Page 2: Why Were These Scenes Cut?
Breaking Into The Grand Palais
The first stop-off in the main story of Mission: Impossible - Fallout is Paris, where Ethan Hunt and August Walker sneak into a party at the Grand Palais where terrorist John Lark intends to meet up with broke White Widow. In the movie, Hunt and Walker HALO jump into Paris (by way of a lightning storm) before entering the Palais and getting wrapped up in the arm-reloading bathroom fight.
Initially, though, there was an extra beat between those two sequences: as seen in 1:53 of the Super Bowl trailer, a set piece had Hunt trying to get into the party from the roof using overhead wires, only for it to snap and send him swinging over the dancing revelers below.
As this would have been the second of three set pieces in a ten-minute run, it's a sensible cut; fun as it is to see Tom Cruise dangling from a ceiling again, this is the one with the least plot relevance. It's possible that the HALO jump sequence, filmed after much of principal photography was done, rendered the Palais break-in obsolete; if it was a late addition, it presents a much more daring sneak entrance (to a country instead of a building).
Related: Henry Cavill's Mission: Impossible Role Is The Perfect Critique Of His Superman
The Team Finds A Jeep And Dead Soldiers
After the London foot chase (in which Cruise's on-set injury is not used), Mission: Impossible - Fallout jumps to Kashmir, with Ethan and his team driving a jeep towards the site of Solomon Lane's intended nuclear attack. However, it seems like a piece of narrative connective tissue was cut just before.
At the start of the Super Bowl trailer, a sequence involving the team showed Ilsa inspecting dead bodies, blood dripping from frozen barbed wire, Ethan approaching a bunker and the four stood around the jeep (with an India flag in the background confirming the Kashmir location). This would seem to show how they got the jeep - found amid dead soldiers, possibly pacification as part of Lane's plan. Like the Palais sequence, this doesn't add much to the plot, rather setting the scene, making it an easier moment to cut.
The Helicopter Dodges A Truck
The most spectacular sequence in Mission: Impossible - Fallout has to be the final helicopter chase through the mountains of Kashmir: Ethan Hunt climbs up a rope into a flying chopper, takes control, chases down Walker in another helicopter, sets the engine on fire, crashes, then falls out for a final showdown on the edge of cliff. It may (emphasis on the may) have featured more, however.
Related: Mission: Impossible - Fallout's "Hook" Moment Is A Series Best
The Super Bowl trailer ended on the nail-biting shot of Ethan's helicopter flying straight towards a truck. What makes this one so curious is that it doesn't really fit with the movie's story as told: at no point in the helicopter chase do Hunt or Walker leave the mountains, let alone go near a road. This is complicated by the fact that the truck appears to be a left-hand drive from the UK portion of the shoot. What seems the most likely conclusion is that it was shot in the UK for production ease, with it planned to be transplanted to the Kashmir setting (similar to how New Zealand doubled for the Asian country or Paris was digitally added to the HALO jump) before the sequence was cut.
Page 2 of 2: Why Were These Scenes Cut?
Other Mission: Impossible - Fallout Trailer Scenes That Were Cut
The previous three sequences aren't the sum total of moments from Mission: Impossible - Fallout's marketing that didn't make the silver screen, with several dialogue moments also absent: CIA Director Erica Sloane calling Hunt a "liability"; Benji questioning if their plan is a good idea; Luthor telling Ethan that Walker is an "assassin". These, however, aren't as striking as the others; it's much more common for specific lines to be used prominently in trailers then not make the final cut. This is a pretty standard side effect on editing, and is certainly not on the scale of entire sequences.
Why Were The Major Sequences Cut From Mission: Impossible 6?
While it's interesting to note that these scenes were cut from Mission: Impossible - Fallout and what purpose they played in the narrative as originally intended, the bigger question is why. The simplest answer is timing. Mission: Impossible - Fallout is a long film as released, so anything non-narrative needed to justify its place. Speaking to Collider, McQuarrie revealed that even while shooting there were scenes the director knew wouldn't make it past the assembly cut and that the first nearly-complete version had a full 23 minutes of extra footage included. Slicing the film down to size required alterations to the entire picture:
"There were scenes that we really loved that were things we really believed in and wanted to. Tom had stuff he loved, I had things that I loved, we had things that we loved together. But even if a line of dialogue had come out, even if it was one we loved and it comes out without interrupting the story, we took it out. Sometimes it was just frames here or there."
Related: Mission: Impossible is Now Better Than James Bond
As for why these entire scenes were elected to come out, it was more pacing than overall time. Speaking to Digital Spy, McQuarrie stated it was more about the amount of action in the film:
"We put together this big, giant film and we were testing the movie, we tested it four times before we finally finished it, and there was just so much action in the movie. We had to choose what was going to stay and what will go."
As already highlighted, these three scenes were all plot-inessential, offering some thrilling or atmospheric moments but not really pushing the story forward. That doesn't make them unnecessary entirely, but definitely suitable candidates to cut when things need adjusting. Given the rave reviews for Mission: Impossible - Fallout, the movie certainly didn't need them.