Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning's Train Scene Was Originally 90 Minutes Long

It doesn’t feel like it, but the action-packed train sequence in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One lasts for 50 minutes. You could watch an entire episode of The Crown in that time. But according to editor Eddie Hamilton, it used to be even longer, clocking in at a whopping 90 minutes.

In it, Tom Cruise’s super spy Ethan Hunt rides a bike off a cliff and attempts to parachute onto a train as it hurtles through the Austrian alps. You can even watch this insane stunt from Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One here. What we got in the final film, however, was the abridged version.

Hamilton tells Variety in a recent interview how the set-piece "was about an hour-and-a-half long in our first iteration. We got it down to like 50 minutes in the finished movie…we combed through every shot and asked if we needed this frame and, 'Can we cut this any tighter?' We're really trying to squeeze every bit of air out of the movie."

That explains why the sequence holds your attention so well. But Hamilton wasn’t just focused on mercilessly chopping bits out. In one particular scene, he had to keep bits in. This is the moment between Ethan and Paris (Pom Klementieff), which needed room for the dialogue to breathe.

“I did a much tighter version of that scene that was about half the length," says Hamilton. "It was just information, but we watched it and there was nothing there. There was no emotion at all. We realized we had overcooked it.”

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is already the longest film in the series, but with Hamilton dangling the idea of a 90-minute, uncut version of one of the movie’s best moments in front of us, suddenly it doesn’t feel long enough.