Roll up, Insiders. Jesse Whittock here with the outlook on the latest international TV and film news, as the Olympic flag left Paris and began its long journey to LA — certainly no Mission Impossible. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Tom Cruise Drops In To Steal The Show

Actor Tom Cruise is seen during the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic GamesGetty Images

Cruise control: Like a moth to a flame or a teenage girl to a Taylor Swift concert, Tom Cruise is drawn to global entertainment events. And half the time, he’s got a stunt in mind. Sunday’s closing ceremony of the Olympic Games was the perfect case in point. While Cruise had been seen in the crowd throughout the three weeks of sporting competition, rumors in Hollywood swirled that he’d embark on a Mission Impossible-style entrance as the Paris event wound down and the Olympic torch was, literally and figuratively, handed on to the 2028 host, LA. It was no surprise, then, when the Top Gun star was spotted on the rim of the Stade de France before abseiling into the center of the stadium to join LA Mayor Karen Bass and gymnastics G.O.A.T. Simone Biles, who had been handed the Olympic flag to take back to the states. Next, he jumped on a motorcycle, strapped in the flag and made an exit, with one commentator suggesting: “Tom’s going to drive this straight to Los Angeles.” A pre-recorded stunt then showed Cruise leaping out of a plane and landing on the Hollywood sign to pass the baton to a group of Team USA Olympians. All that, plus performances from The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Billie Eilish, Snopp Dogg and Dr Dre on the beach. What a show. The LA Games are expected to be the starriest for years, and Cruise and co certainly brought Hollywood to the French capital this month.

Staging the stunt: Over in LA, Peter White tracked down Fulwell 73 co-founder Ben Winston, who had overseen the splashy segment and talked through how he planned and produced such a huge stunt. It went almost exactly as he originally pitched to Cruise, albeit with one major difference — Winston planned to use a stunt man for the stadium descent, and you can imagine how that went down with the action star, who had already jumped out a plane alongside James Corden on the Fulwell-produced Late Late Show. “He said, ‘There’s only one thing. There is no way that you’re going to use a stuntman. It’s me on that roof’,” Winston explained. The Grammys exec producer, no stranger to live events TV, also revealed some of the more stressful elements of the production, which involved technical connections from LA to Paris, working with the Olympic broadcasting team and pre-filming certain sections over security concerns in Venice Beach. “If it had leaked where we were or what was happening, then we would have been shut down,” he recalled. “I’m very aware that we can’t afford to be shut down, because we’re live to a billion people globally… then you’re also aware that the biggest movie star in the world was about to jump off a roof.”

Dom’s verdict: Dominic Patten called the LA portion of the closing ceremony “pure Hollywood,” and it’s hard to argue with that assessment. “It was over the top and cliché-filled — as if anything less would have sufficed,” wrote our man in the U.S. Dom noted that the sheer weight of the star power “simply dimmed” the majestic artistry that Thomas Jolly’s French portion of the three-hour ceremony favored — even despite the country’s new hero, Léon Marchand, bringing the Olympic flame into the stadium. In closing his review, Dom wrote that while Paris did the Olympics its own way, LA “clearly plans to go full bread and circuses in 2028 and give the people what they want.” Find our full Olympics coverage here. Sidenote: I’ll take this moment to shout out to our Paris MVPs Dom and Mel, who transformed from entertainment industry writers into Games gurus overnight and helped make Deadline’s coverage among the most comprehensive and creative you can find anywhere on the web.