Five facts about cinematic car carnage
As long as there have been movies, people have been crashing cars in them.We investigated five ways – big and small – in which Hollywood has explored its fascination with taking cars out of commission.
Most cars destroyed
The Blues Brothers was the film that started the most-cars-destroyed arms race. There were predecessors, like the original Gone in 60 Seconds, filmed in 1975, but something about the sheer lavishness of the way director John Landis de-roadworthied 103 cars – 60 of them police cruisers purchased for $400 a piece – caught the world’s imagination. There had since been incremental gains on the record but it took Michael Bay – never one to do things small – to smash it. A total of 532 cars were destroyed in the course of filming Transformers: Dark of the Moon. If you’re worried about the waste, you needn’t be: they were all water-damaged and had to be destroyed anyway.
Most real money spent destroying cars
James Bond is considerably more sophisticated than Optimus Prime. He may not have destroyed the most cars, but he sure burned the most money in the process of destroying them. The production of Spectre ensured seven Aston Martin DB10s would never see a road again. The cost of Bond’s misbegotten adventures? A total of AU$47m worth of cars donated by Aston Martin.
Bond, James Bond
The Daniel Craig era of Bond movies also set the record for the most number of cannon rolls by a car – in Casino Royale, where the filmmakers sent an Aston Martin DBS spinning a total of seven times. The first time wasn’t the charm. After a failed attempt at executing the stunt with a ramp, a gas cannon full of liquid nitrogen was employed to lift the car off the ground and into the record books.
Most imaginary money spent destroying a car
They didn’t actually consign it to the scrap heap, but the Lykan Hypersport by W Motors destroyed in Furious 7 surely takes the cake for the most expensive staged destruction in a movie: it had an estimated value of around AUD $4.4m. The Hypersport is the first supercar produced in the Middle East and only seven of them were made. One of them – amazingly – was purchased by the Abu Dhabi police force. That’s one cruiser you don’t want to try to outrun. The Furious series isn’t shy about destruction in general. The real-world cost of Dominic Toretto and his various friends and foes has been put at somewhere around AU$687m. And that doesn’t take into account The Fate of the Furious.
Bueller? Bueller?
When director John Hughes destroyed a cherry 250 GT Spyder California at the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off it was a sad day for motoring enthusiasts everywhere. But it actually wasn’t. Renting one of the cars for the production was prohibitively expensive, so they put a fibreglass replica body on an MG chassis. An extra piece of trivia? Leaves on the trees in the ravine into which the car fell were painted green to match the time of year the movie was set. If you look closely, you can see some autumn foliage in the reflections of reverse shots. In an extra piece of trivia, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is connected to another movie famous for its car destruction: The Blues Brothers. The restaurant Ferris tries to bluff his way into as Abe Froman, the sausage king of Chicago, is the same restaurant Jake and Elwood Blues menace when they’re trying to wrest band member Alan Rubin from his job as maître d'.
Related: Old School: Blade Runner - Science fiction becomes fact
Related: Top five movie getaway cars
Related: Five iconic coming-of-age car films
Tags
Please see our Editorial Guidelines & Code of Ethics (including for more information about sponsored content and paid events). The information published on this website is of a general nature only and doesn’t consider your particular circumstances or needs.
