In August 2020, early into the production of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the filmmakers met with controversy for their apparent plan to destroy a Polish monument for the purposes of a stunt. One of Tom Cruise’s death-defying stunts in the seventh Mission: Impossible movie installment involved an explosion on a bridge, and the producers chose the Pilchowicki Bridge in Poland as a shooting location. Headlines about Cruise’s supposed intention to blow up a historic bridge instantly generated a backlash.
The Mission: Impossible franchise has become an exercise in one-upmanship, with Cruise pressured to go bigger with the stunts for each movie. In previous installments, Cruise scaled the facade of the Burj Khalifa and drove a motorcycle the wrong way around the Arc de Triomphe during rush-hour traffic – but neither of those stunts damaged the landmarks. The Pilchowicki Bridge would be different. In 2016, the bridge was deemed to be too dilapidated to be safe for public use and was decommissioned. A few years later, it caught the eye of the Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One stunt team as the best location for an explosive action sequence.
Why The Mission: Impossible 7 Pilchowicki Bridge Stunt Sparked Outrage
Locals considered the Pilchowicki Bridge to be historically significant and didn't want it blown up, especially for a movie like Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. Responding to this backlash, Poland's Deputy Culture Minister, Pawel Lewandowski, pointed out that the bridge isn't a monument: “It stands in ruins and has no value...The law clearly states that a monument is only that which has social, artistic, or scientific value. In art and culture, that value only emerges when there is a relation between the cultural object and people. So, if an object is unused, unavailable, it has no such value, therefore it is not a monument” (via The First News).
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One director Christopher McQuarrie also issued a statement (via Empire) to clear up some misreported facts about the proposed bridge stunt, which would only destroy a small part. Producers had searched for “anywhere in the world [that] might have a bridge that needed getting rid of,” and Poland reached out because “to open up the area to tourism, the [Pilchowicki Bridge] needed to go.” McQuarrie also noted the Pilchowicki Bridge is not “a protected monument” and the Polish government was interested in “revitalizing an outdated rail system,” which involved “replacing the main decking of the bridge in question, which engineers had deemed structurally unsound.”
McQuarrie, who is also signed on to direct the franchise's last movie, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two, explained that no permanent damage would be done to the Pilchowicki Bridge: “We could only destroy the already unsafe portions of the bridge that needed to be rebuilt, and not the original stone pilings at either end, upon which a new bridge could one day be constructed.” The Polish government was on board because the demolitions needed to be done anyway, and bringing a large-scale movie production to Poland would be great for the economy.
Did The Makers Of Mission: Impossible 7 Actually Blow Up The Pilchowicki Bridge?
Following the backlash, the 110-year-old Pilchowicki Bridge was added to Poland’s Registry of Monuments (per Gazeta Wyborcza), meaning that anyone intending to damage it would be harshly penalized. The planned Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One stunt was ultimately filmed instead at a quarry in Derbyshire, England, in August 2021 (via the BBC), a year after the bridge controversy, with a steam locomotive careening off a cliff into the water below. Despite the change, the train wreck will surely still contribute to the movie’s gung-ho spectacle, and without upsetting any locals.
