The Fast and Furious movies are always good for their over the top stunts and big action set pieces. The newest entry in the franchise was no exception. One thing that did make The Fate of the Furious standout, however. One of their big moments was incredibly expensive. At a point, that you see in most of the trailers, Charlize Theron's Cipher takes control of dozens of unmanned cars and uses them as weapons by throwing them at our heroes. This includes dropping them onto the street from a parking garage. While destroying that many cars wasn't going to be cheap regardless of how you did it, The Fate of the Furious spent a lot of money on it because all those cars were basically new. According to director F. Gary Gray...
My producers kind of looked at me like I was out of my mind even requesting the amount of cars needed... they have to be newer vehicles. So to destroy them for the sake of getting different angles for different coverage was quite expensive, but ultimately, we do it for the fans.
The Fast and Furious franchise has always done a lot of their stunts practically rather than digitally. This was still the case when F. Gary Gray needed to drop a bunch of cars out of a parking garage. Quite often when stunts that will destroy cars are needed, older cars get used. This would especially be the case when a movie wants to destroy as many cars as were totaled in The Fate of the Furious. However, the Fast and Furious franchise is all about cars and throwing out a bunch of old junk cars would have been conspicuous with all the nice new ones driving around. Add to this the fact that some cars were going to need to be seen falling out of the garage from multiple angles, requiring multiples of the same car, and you can see how the budget of The Fate of the Furious likely took a serious bump upward thanks to this one scene alone. Gray tells Vanity Fair that filming the sequence took weeks of dropping cars over and over just to get enough footage for the scene.
You can see some of the falling cars in the trailer below.
The budget for The Fate of the Furious was reportedly $250 million, which is no small number. The good news, however, is that the investment apparently paid off. The Fate of the Furious looks to have brought in over $530 million in its global opening weekend, in large part thanks to a huge opening in China.
The Fate of the Furious probably did its part to keep the global automobile industry in business for the next several years. Although, it will only be a couple of years before they make Fast and Furious 9 and they'll surely want to find a way to top that stunt.
