What Was That Thing on Tom Cruise's Leg at the Olympics Closing Ceremony? Was There a Malfunction?

It's so hard not to enjoy watching Tom Cruise.

Yes, he's had some fumbles along the way in his career (the off-putting comments about Brooke Shields taking antidepressants for her postpartum depression; the weird jumping on Oprah's couch; the even weirder marriage to Katie Holmes, which of course was entangled in the whole beyond-weird Scientology thing, which has reportedly kept him out of daughter Suri's life).

But dang it, if you didn't have a smile on your face when watching Tom jump from the top of the Stade de France during the closing ceremony for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris, then we're shocked to hear it.

The actor, who's been known to pull off wild stunts in his films, treated us all to another heart-pounding performance in which he helped symbolize the hand-off from Paris to LA, where the 2028 Olympics are set to take place. But what was that thing on his leg, though?!

While you were watching Tom descend from the sky, before he landed amid the cheering athletes, you may have noticed that he had something attached to the lower part of his right leg. It also looked like he was pulling on something that was connected to the mysterious apparatus. So what the heck was that thing anyway?

Over on Reddit, some folks were concerned that maybe an element of the stunt had gone haywire during the descent and that something had perhaps been supposed to deploy from the thing on his leg. Some people thought that maybe a flag was meant to pop out of it, or possibly smoke.

"Pretty sure that was just a leg rope rappel bag (not a zipline)," wrote one commenter.

"It was supposed to be there. The bag kept the [remaining] rope on the line and Cruise continually adjusting his arm was to control the speed of descent," wrote another Reddit user.

Someone else then posted a picture of a tactical rope bag, which sure does look like what we saw on Tom's leg.

However, another user said that there probably was a flag in the bag and that the actor wasn't actually controlling his own descent. "The repel rope theories are incorrect," they wrote. "We do not let the talent determine when they get to come down. That’s how accidents happen and people die."

We wish we had a better answer for everyone, but it looks like until Tom confirms it, we'll just have to assume that it was likely one of two things: either a prop malfunction or a way for the actor to simply control his speed as he descended.

The whole thing sure looked cool, though!