Mission: Impossible 8 briefly defeated by sheep

Filming on Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible 8 was briefly shut down this week, after the film’s shooting location in England’s Lake District was invaded by a flock of sheep.

That’s right: Superspy Ethan Hunt, who’s successfully outwitted criminal masterminds, rogue agents, and that one parking garage that seemed like it was absolutely designed to break someone’s neck in Ghost Protocol, has apparently been stymied by a pack of roving ruminants.

It doesn’t sound like the incident—which took place as Cruise and company were filming the eighth installment of the franchise, even as Mission: Impossible 7 is still waiting for its July 14, 2023 release date—took up too much time on the film’s set, as roughly a hundred or so animals apparently ambled around the location, and the cast and crew all enjoyed the sheer unmitigated ruralness of it all. It is a nice reminder, though, that while Cruise continues to portray himself as Hollywood’s most unkillable son, there are at least a few things that can still briefly stop his insatiable desire for death-defying stunts.

(It also produced a line from People’s write-up of the incident in which it was remarked that, “The sheep likely didn’t mean to disrupt filming,” and, hey: What if they did?)

Of course, we’re being inaccurate when we refer to the film in question as Mission: Impossible 8; we actually mean Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two, the name it carries in bold defiance of multiple international treaties aimed at the conservation of punctuation marks. The film, like most of Cruise’s recent outings as Ethan Hunt, is being written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, whose willingness to allow Cruise to glue himself to planes or hang off satellites by his teeth or whatever presumably make up for any of his apparent failures as a countryside animal wrangler.

[via Fox News]