Ever since the days of Buster Keaton, filmmakers have sought ever-more-ingenious ways to take audiences’ breaths away with increasingly elaborate stunt work. We love “special effects,” especially when there’s an element of danger for those performing them.
Movie stunts take an incredible amount of work, logistics and safety precautions to properly execute — not to mention a ton of nail-biting from nervous insurance underwriters (we’re looking at you, Tom Cruise!). Yet no matter how much time and preparation goes into planning a big-time movie stunt, things can still go horribly, tragically wrong.
Fortunately, most of the time, the professional daredevils are able to dust themselves off and make ready for the next death-defying stunt. And some, notably Jackie Chan and the aforementioned Cruise, have managed to defy both age and the odds by doing many of their own dangerous stunts.
Here are 30 of the most dangerous movie stunts ever captured.
The Story Behind the Stunt
Paramount Pictures / IMDb
“Kick the tires, and light the fires!”
Maverick (Tom Cruise) and Goose (Anthony Edwards) were cocky young pilots at the Top Gun school near San Diego, which made them perfect candidates for the Navy’s most elite flight school. Alas, in the film’s darkest moment, Maverick’s fighter jet goes into a flat spin, forcing him and Goose to eject before it crashes. Goose dies in the accident, and it nearly ends Maverick’s flying career.
In an eerie coincidence, stunt pilot Art Scholl, while filming a similar flat spin for the “Top Gun” cameras, lost control of his plane, which plunged into the Pacific. Neither the plane nor Scholl’s body was ever recovered.
The Story Behind the Stunt
Martial arts legend Bruce Lee died suddenly in 1973 at 32, just as he was breaking internationally. Twenty years later, his son Brandon Lee was on the verge of the big time when he, too, was taken too soon. The set of the younger Lee’s otherworldly tale “The Crow” — about a murdered guitar player who returns from the dead to avenge himself — was plagued with spooky happenings, including a crew member accidentally being electrocuted and another disgruntled crewman driving his car into the set.
On March 31, 1993, a fairly routine stunt went horribly, tragically wrong when a “dummy” bullet — a round without gunpowder — became lodged in a prop gun (the arms master reportedly had been sent home). When the gun was fired by actor Michael Massee, the gunpowder “blank” ejected the dummy bullet into Lee’s chest, and he died a short time later at just 28 years old. Stunt doubles and clever editing helped Lee “complete” his performance, but we’ll never know what might have been.
The Story Behind the Stunt
Even comedies bank on big stunts, but laughter isn’t enough to stave off on-set disaster. Catastrophe visited the set of “Gone Fishin’,” which reunited Joe Pesci and Danny Glover from the “Lethal Weapon” franchise. During shooting a water-based chase near Naples, Florida, in December 1995, a speedboat that was supposed to jump a ramp slid off the launch and plowed into several other boats. Stuntwoman Janet Wilder, who was manning another production boat with her stuntman husband Scott, was killed in the incident, and four others were injured.
Wilder’s father, Glenn R. Wilder, was also injured but survived. He would work in movie stunts for another 24 years before dying in 2017 at age 83.
