It was horrifying to hear back in 2010 that an extra in a car scene of Transformers: Dark of the Moon had been seriously injured when a cable carrying a stunt car snapped and cracked the windshield of her car. The woman, Gabriela Cedillo, was left with permanent brain damage, and as you might expect, opted to sue Paramount for negligence. Today that court case has been settled, and according to TMZ Cedillo and her family have been awarded an $18.5 million settlement.
Paramount and DreamWorks Studios, who produced the film, had offered to pay Cedillo's medical bills, which added up to $350,000 and then some. Then, according to the lawsuit, the studios did "everything they could to avoid payment," which on top of the clear negligence in the stunt definitely doesn't do much to help their case. To put the $18.5 million award in perspective, it's less than 2% of the $1.123 billion Paramount and DreamWorks made on Transformers: Dark of the Moon at the global box office, and probably an amount the studio is happy to pay in order to avoid boycott from actor's guilds, or any other extras who might consider participating in a giant action movie.
We hear of accidents among the crew and stunt people on major films fairly frequently-- a cameraman on The Dark Knight even died filming a shot-- but it's rare to see an extra injured so badly, and so permanently. Hopefully this huge settlement will help avoid something as catastrophic from happening to anyone in the name of what's really just entertainment.
