Do they really crash super cars in action movies?

Do they really crash super cars in action movies? - People Riding Horses on Brown Sand

Many action movies show supercars (i.e. $200k+) being completely totaled during the action. I can imagine that some scenes are not CGI because they look overly natural. I also understand that with a movie budget of let's say $60M they can well afford to crash a few Lambos.

So, are they really crashing those supercars in action movies, or do they use some sort of dummy cars and add-on sounds to them?



Best Answer

For Casino Royale, yes and no:

At the time of filming, Aston Martin were still in the final phases of designing the DBS. The scene involving the car crash was devised using an Aston Martin DB9 that was especially modified to look like Bond's Aston Martin DBS V12 and reinforced to withstand the impact.

Instead of wrecking an incredibly rare $300,000 DBS, they wrecked a more common $200,000 DB9.




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Do they actually destroy cars in movies?

Yes, movie studios do use actual classic cars in many cases, also known as \u201chero cars.\u201d Think of a hero car like the star. It's too expensive and precious to go blowing up, so it has a stunt team.

Do they destroy real cars in fast and furious?

They destroyed over 350 cars during the filming of Fast and Furious 9. \u201cI think with all of these films, you read the script and go 'wow',\u201d McCarthy says. \u201cIt seems like it just gets so much more extreme with every new one.

Did they crash real cars in Need for Speed?

SW: The cars in the movie are all real. The ones we wrecked aren't real, obviously, because I didn't want to wreck the real cars, because I felt they were art pieces. The McLaren P1 was the only real car we couldn't get.

What happens to cars that are wrecked in movies?

They are typically either minorly repaired for use as a background prop in other productions, or if beaten too extensively, will be sent to the salvage yard.



SUPERCAR CRASH FAILS #1 - Crashes and Fails - Crash Comps




More answers regarding do they really crash super cars in action movies?

Answer 2

It's very broad to say yes or no. But no, they don't. They use shells, stripped down frames, with standard engines, but with the appropriate paneling to make it look like the real thing. The inside shots are done either with rentals or CGI, but the crashes are the dummies as you put it. All for budget reasons. A replica is only a fraction of the real thing.

Note, the real thing doesn't have truss framing in it: enter image description here enter image description here

At least, that's how it was done for the Need For Speed movie. See chapter two here.

Answer 3

Here's a good link regarding the filming for Need for Speed. In Need for Speed at least, they used real cars. Besides Need for Speed, they'll frequently use replicas of the shells of cars to crash. They have a special feature in The Bourne Supremacy that talks about this. In Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, the main characters Mustang had 5 or 6 replicas with only one of them having the real engine in it.

Answer 4

Others have answered about the specifics of cars being wrecked. But in general, when you are talking about big budget films where the potential box office returns will be in the millions and billions, $200,000 is chump change. It has nothing to do with publicity or some elaborate scheme; it’s simply how the world of film/TV works.

For example, the budget to film/produce The Fast and the Furious series was in total $759 million dollars (0.7B). The world wide box office returns for those films totaled $3,900 million dollars (3.9B). Go ahead and wreck a pile of $200,000 cars because at the end of the day, the film will be vomiting more cash than the studios/producers know what to do with.

When a movie/TV show comes along and builds elaborate sets and trash them in the end, that is an equal “waste.” And heck, look at the world of computers where people drop test iPhones. To you and me, a $399 iPhone is a costly object. To a website/magazine that will get revenue from the article on the topic, that is just an expense of the piece.

Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Images: Sandy, Mat Sheard, Pixabay, Nout Gons