Tom Cruise v. Christopher Nolan: The Battle for the Best IMAX Stunts

For over a decade, Tom Cruise and Christopher Nolan have been creating some of the best IMAX movies by conjuring up some of the best movie stunts ever and photographing them with the glorious clarity of 65mm IMAX cameras. From the truck flip in The Dark Knight to the HALO jump in Mission Impossible Fallout, we take a deep dive into how these filmmakers committed these crazy stunts to celluloid.

Tom Cruise is back in the cockpit with Top Gun: Maverick. The sequel has some of the best dog fight scenes ever made. A big reason these scenes feel so genuine is that Tom Cruise and the other Top Gun 2 actors were actually filmed in real jet fighters pulling real Gs. Tom knows that a big Tom Cruise stunt is the main reason people go see Tom Cruise movies, but Tom Cruise isn’t the only filmmaker out there filming crazy stunts for IMAX cameras.

There’s also Christopher Nolan, who was the first filmmaker to really usher in this era of IMAX movies featuring crazy movie stunts. Of course we talk about Christopher Nolan’s truck flip from The Dark Knight, his follow-up to Batman Begins.

If it wasn’t for The Dark Knight, Tom Cruise might not have been motivated to make what is easily one of his top 5 action scenes of all time, the wall-running stunt on the Burj Khalifa.

Dangling from a building 2,700 ft up may seem like one of the craziest Tom Cruise stunts, but Christopher Nolan was ready to top it with the plane heist in The Dark Kngiht Rises.

We also talk about the plane stunt from Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, the dog fights in Dunkirk, the HALO jump from Mission Impossible: Fallout, and the 747 crash in Tenet. All of these scenes can easily propel these movies make top 10 lists of best action movies, and they’re all the better because they were shot in IMAX.

So tune in and check out how Tom Cruise and Chris Nolan waged the battle for the Best IMAX Stunts.