If you went to see Furious 7 over the weekend, and from the box office numbers a great many of you spent your Easter doing exactly that, you were treated to some of the most insane car stunts ever recorded on film. And you probably assumed this, but in the process, the production wrecked a ridiculous number of cars.
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Furious 7 destroyed a total of 230 cars, including everything from a Ford Crown Victoria to multiple high end Mercedes-Benz, among many others. Having served their purpose now, most of these unsung movie stars were rewarded by being smashed into big metal cubes.
It makes sense most of these cars have been damaged beyond repair in the course of filming. They may seem damn near indestructible on screen as they parachute out of a cargo plane, leap from skyscraper to skyscraper, and careen down winding roads in the Cossack Mountains (really a stretch of highway outside of Colorado Springs), but, unfortunately for them, they are not impervious to catastrophic damage.
Such elevated levels of destruction are nothing new for the car-centric action franchise. Last time out, Fast & Furious 6 reportedly ruined up to 25 cars per day while filming in Spain, which is an impressive feat. Then again, they did have to contend with an armored tank hauling ass down a freeway, crunching cars as it went, blowing others to smithereens with its guns. That’ll cause a seroius mess.
Filming such elaborate, dangerous scenes, these cars are all specially rigged with safety equipment to ensure that stunt performers can walk away from the spectacular crashes. They’re mechanically altered, have special tires, and equipped with roll cages, among other precautions, but due to liability issues, these cars are now usually destroyed afterwards.
Producers and people who run the scrap yards where the vehicular corpses wind up don’t want to be on the other end of a lawsuit if someone buys one of these relics, refurbishes it, and attempts to replicate one of these stunts on their own without proper supervision or protection. And you know people would do that. Just because you have a roll cage doesn’t mean you can’t get hurt. There a specific set of protocols to follow to ensure the cars meet the appropriate end, each step of which is documented, and they have to account for every wrecked automobile.
If you want to see some of these stunts for yourself, all you need to do is take yourself to you local metroplex, plunk down some of your hard earned money for a ticket, sit back, and watch Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, and the rest of the Furious 7 crew perform an ever escalating series of insane feats of automotive acrobatics. It’s a damn good time and one hell of a ride.
