Tom Cruise's new stunt might be his most dangerous yet

Tom Cruise is known for doing his own hair-raising stunts - but he might have just outdone himself.

Cruise performs a stunt in American Made, a drug caper due for release later in the year, so outlandish the film's director calls it "outrageous".

In the film, Cruise plays an airline pilot who starts running drugs and guns illegally.

And in the scene, he's flying a plane when he abandons the controls to drop bags of cocaine out of a window.

Director Doug Liman, a pilot, told Yahoo Movies the stunt - parts of which can be seen in the film's new trailer - was incredibly dangerous to shoot as Cruise insisted on being in the plane on his own.

"In the story, he's throwing bales of cocaine out of the airplane, loading them up with guns, so every once in a while in this scene he's got to climb out of the cockpit and go to the back of the airplane to dump the cocaine out," he said.

"That made a big impression on me - there's nobody in the cockpit of the plane! ... It's one thing to have Tom Cruise alone in the airplane flying it - that's already outrageous - now he's alone and he's not even in the cockpit so he's gone beyond."

Cruise is due in New Zealand soon to shoot scenes for Mission: Impossible 6 in the Rees Valley near Glenorchy.

American Made is due for release on September 29. Cruise also stars in The Mummy, which hits New Zealand theatres tomorrow.