Mission: Impossible director reveals a deleted scene from Final Reckoning’s dangerous submarine sequence with Tom Cruise and explains why it didn’t make it into the film: "It just didn't work"

A deleted scene from Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has been revealed, and director Christopher McQuarrie says the intense footage was ultimately cut from the film because they "didn't need it."

"We'd become so efficient shooting underwater [that] we were able to get extra material of Tom trying to get into the submarine, having difficulty accessing it, in case later we wanted to create a sense of pressure," McQuarrie says in the clip (via IGN). "And again, Tom was checking his dive computer, the audience saw this ticking clock... something that's very common in Mission: Impossible. But in this movie, it just didn't work."

In the brief clip, which can be viewed below, we see Ethan Hunt struggle to get inside the submarine. He drops his tools and swims deeper into the water to retrieve them. It's tense, but the full submarine scene that we see in the final cut of the film is high-stakes enough without it.

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The sequence was shot in an 8.5 million liter water tank on a rotating gimbal, and required Tom Cruise to wear a special suit and mask – the kind of heavy scuba gear made for deep sea diving expeditions and retrievals. Cruise could only wear the suit for 10 minutes at a time before becoming at risk of hypoxia.

Continued McQuarrie: "This was to create a sense of difficulty for Ethan, and again, we loved all of it, but as we were putting the movie together, we just decided we didn't need it."

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning does not yet have a streaming release date, but will be available on VOD beginning August 19. For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies in 2025 and beyond.