ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — A movie scene with Tom Cruise for “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”, the 7th installment in the iconic film series, was shot at Litewave Media in St. Petersburg.

The media company will begin production on a new Rom-Com later this month, according to founder Christian Cashmir.

What You Need To Know

  • A movie scene with Tom Cruise for “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” was filmed at Litewave Media

  • The Litewave Media founder's looking forward to working on his next big movie, “Mother Nature And The Doomsday Prepper”

  • Actor Mickey Rourke, who received an Academy Award nomination for his role in “The Wrestler,” has been hired to play Zeus

  • Filming is scheduled to begin on Feb. 20

“Apparently, Tom Cruise spends some time in the area,” he said. “It might have been a convenient place for him to film.”

Cashmir said the set for the scene was shipped to Florida from the United Kingdom. The scene appears near the beginning of the movie when Cruise, who plays Ethan Hunt, gets his instructions from a self-destructing message.

Nearly three minutes of the scene filmed at Litewave Media made the cut with some flashbacks intertwined which were not shot locally, according to Cashmir.  

“The scene that they filmed here in our studio was one of the first scenes that Tom Cruise is in,” he said. “He’s at a table and he’s looking through a bunch of documents.”

The movie was released by Paramount Pictures last July and the scene in St. Petersburg was filmed just a couple of months earlier in May.

“They wrapped out filming right here in our studio. Which was kind of surreal hearing the crew go ‘alright, that’s a wrap on Tom. That’s a wrap on Mission Impossible 7,’” said Cashmir. “Everybody clapped and were kind of looking at each other like ‘oh, that’s cool.’”

The MI7 crew signed a poster for Cashmir, gave him a mug shot card with a photo of Tom Cruise which was used in the movie, and he got to watch a rough cut in his screening room.

“They said, ‘hey Christian, you have a nice screening room. Would you mind if we sat down and watched a rough cut of the movie?’ And I was like ‘are you kidding me? Of course,’” said Cashmir. “Then, they were like ‘if you want, you can sit in the back room and watch.’ And I was like ‘okay, let’s do this.’”

The Litewave Media founder said he’s looking forward to working on his next big movie, “Mother Nature and the Doomsday Prepper,” where his company will handle all the pre-and-post production work.

“We’re really excited to have a project like this that’s coming here and using all the local crew and local cast,” he said. “95 percent of the crew above and below the line is all local. Whereas most of these other films that come in here they bring in their directors, they bring in their producers, they bring in their DPs.”

“Mother Nature and the Doomsday Prepper” is a fantasy romance movie where mother nature is going to lose her job unless she can convince a fanatic doomsday prepper that there’s still hope for mankind. Actor Mickey Rourke, who received an Academy Award nomination for his role in “The Wrestler,” has been cast as Zeus.

Cashmir said the entire movie will also be filmed locally, which was written by executive producer Laurie Criego.  

“She created this project. She wrote it and she brought it here to St. Petersburg-Tampa,” he said. “We’re going to shoot most of ‘Mother Nature and the Doomsday Prepper,’ locally here in St. Petersburg, Florida. A few scenes in Tampa.”

Producer Cameron Brumbelow, owner of Angry Elf Entertainment, said the local film incentives from Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties are a major reason the film will be made in the Tampa Bay area.

“Film incentive wise, this is exactly what Pinellas County is looking for,” he said. “This movie features the best of the county in all aspects.”   

Criego had a couple of other options to film the movie but chose Litewave Media due to the location, incentives and production value, according to Cashmir.

“Laurie Criego could’ve taken this project to Palm Beach. She could’ve taken it to Minnesota. She was courting those locations,” he said. “She felt like this was the right place to do it.”  

Litewave Media has a 40 foot wide and 15 foot tall LED wall that is used as a backdrop for a few scenes in the movie.

“We’re also going to actually build an entire ship in here. So, we’re going to have a 40 foot boat. Like an ancient Greek sailing ship,” said Cashmir. “The LED wall will serve as sort of the water and the clouds in the background. So, it’s some stuff that I personally have never done.”

To accommodate larger productions, Cashmir and his wife spent $2 million purchasing and renovating a nearly 12,000 square-foot office warehouse in 2021.

“We kind of wanted to take the next step and invest in the business and hopefully it would bring us bigger projects,” he said. “So far, we’ve been fortunate enough to work on some pretty amazing things and also produce our own content here in the studio.”

Cashmir said MI7 has been the biggest budget movie Litewave Media has worked on so far. Some other big productions include the “Summer of Soul” which won an Oscar for Best Documentary, National Geographic’s “Drain the Oceans” series and music videos for Australian rock band AC/DC.

Brumbelow and Cashmir most recently worked together on the feature film “R.A.D.A.R.: The Adventures of Bionic Dog” which was distributed by Lions Gate Films last year. Filming for “Mother Nature And The Doomsday Prepper” is scheduled to begin on Feb. 20.