Stunts performed in movies are often some of the most impressive yet most overlooked achievements in the entertainment industry. Whether performed by the lead actor or a stunt person, a well-executed stunt can make or break a movie’s highest point of tension. Stunt work is also incredibly dangerous, even for seasoned pros, so these unsung heroes deserve so much more recognition for making movie magic happen.
This list will take a look at the 10 best movie stunts over the last 20 years and dive into what makes each so impressive. From Fast & Furious to Mission: Impossible, this list covers a wide variety of stunts, each more monumental than the last.
Furious 7’s C-130 Air Drop Dropped Muscle Cars & Fans’ Jaws
Furious 7 is the seventh main installment in the Fast & Furious series, and features the series’ most impressive stunt. Furious 7 made over $1.5 billion at the box office and has strong critical and fan reviews to justify those ticket sales. Many fans even consider Furious 7 one of the best movies in this massive franchise.
The stunt in question here goes to the C-130 air drop scene, because the drop itself was real. Rather than use CGI or clever camera work to trick the audience into believing the drop happened, Furious 7 actually dropped fully functional muscle cars out of a military cargo plane. Five cars were dropped from a plane and outfitted with giant parachutes to control the drop. During filming, which was done by skydivers and a camera crew free-falling alongside the cars, one of the cars actually lost its parachute and was completely destroyed on impact.
The Fall Guy’s Cannon Roll Shattered a Guinness World Record
The Fall Guy is an ambitious film about a stuntman who gets injured on the job and tries to return to the industry after a lengthy recovery. He also gets wrapped up in some unforeseen criminal affairs that threaten not only his life, but his freedom. This movie was extremely expensive to produce because every single stunt was 100% real, and, sadly, despite stellar reviews, it barely broke even.
As a tribute to the stuntmen and women of Hollywood, The Fall Guy is full of incredible and awe-inspiring stunts that could have made this list. This spot has to go to the cannon roll, though, which ended with a count of 8.5 rolls. For 17 years, the Guinness World Record for a cannon roll was seven rolls, so The Fall Guy shattered that record and now holds the Guinness World Record for the number of rolls in a cannon roll. Stunt driver Logan Holladay performed this record-breaking stunt.
John Wick: Chapter 4’s Sacré-Cœur Stair Fall Will Make the Audience Wince
By now, John Wick is an assassin who needs no introduction. The John Wick franchise has become the gold standard for dark, gritty action-thriller films. Every single John Wick movie and spin-off features incredible, complex, and creative fight sequences, car chases, and stunts. Like with a lot of the entries on this list, there are so many stunts to choose from in the John Wick franchise, but it has to go to the Sacré-Cœur stair fall scene in John Wick: Chapter 4.
John Wick, on a time crunch to make it to a duel that will decide his fate, must fight his way up the infamous Rue Foyatier staircase leading up to the Sacré-Cœur in Paris, France. After dispatching numerous enemies who try to delay him, John is knocked back down the massive staircase, where he falls, uninterrupted, for 222 steps. John must pull himself back up and reascend the stairs to make it to his duel on time, further proving John’s resilience. This brutal stunt was performed by French stuntman Vincent Bouillon.
Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol Is the First Mission: Impossible Mention on this List
Mission: Impossible is an action and spy film series that stars Tom Cruise as Agent Ethan Hunt, a member of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF). What sets Cruise apart from a lot of the other entries on this list is that Cruise himself does a vast majority of his own stunts, rather than leaving the danger to a stunt person. This won’t be the first time we talk about Cruise’s accomplishments on this list, but this entry goes to Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol’s Burj Khalifa climb.
This stunt sees Cruise scaling the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Not only does Cruise scale the side of the building, but he also runs across the side of the building horizontally at 123 stories in the sky. Cruise was about 1,700 feet in the air. One wrong move would have sent one of the most famous action stars plummeting to his death, and yet, Cruise insisted on doing the stunt himself.
Tenet Features a Real Boeing 747 Crash
Tenet is a tragically overlooked Christopher Nolan action sci-fi movie that follows a CIA agent tracking objects traveling backward in time. At the same time, those objects are somehow linked to a disaster that has yet to happen and will spark World War III. It’s a shame this film was released during the COVID-19 pandemic, which likely contributed to it not breaking even. Tenet had a budget of over $200 million, and a large portion of that likely went toward the impressive stunt work.
The most impressive stunt to come out of this movie was crashing a real, retired Boeing 747 plane into an airport terminal. Nolan opted to buy a real plane because it was more cost-efficient than using CGI to create the scene. It also helped the scene look more authentic because, well, it was. The Boeing 747 was stripped of almost everything that could be considered hazardous, and then crashed into a building at the Southern California Logistics Airport.
Extraction is a special addition to this list because it’s a Netflix original movie, not a film created for theatrical release. Its impressive stunt work proves that, despite being made for streaming, it still went to the same great lengths to create a masterful action film that’s engaging and enticing. Extraction proved so popular that it spawned an entire Netflix franchise, and many fans consider it Chris Hemsworth’s best movie.
Extraction‘s best stunt is a 12-minute-long car chase and fight sequence, heavily choreographed to give the impression that everything that happens in those 12 minutes happens uninterrupted. The final result speaks for itself; it truly feels like a single take from start to finish. There were so many moving parts to this sequence, it’s impossible not to marvel at how so many actors and stunt performers work in tandem to bring it to life.
The Dark Knight Rises’ Mid-Air Plane Hijacking Will Blow Your Mind
The Dark Knight Rises is another Christopher Nolan film and the final installment in Christian Bale’s Dark Knight trilogy. The Dark Knight Rises faced many challenges following Heath Ledger’s tragic death. Ledger, of course, played one of the most infamous interpretations of the Joker ever put to the silver screen in The Dark Knight, and without him, its sequel needed to pivot.
Nolan still managed to pull off a pretty incredible film, including one of the most impressive stunts of the last 20 years. This sequence features a midair hijacking in which a stuntman is dropped from an airborne plane onto an inverted turboprop plane, both in the sky. This stunt resulted in the turboprop plane’s wings being ripped off. This intense scene, coordinated by Tom Struthers, was the opening scene of the film, proving that it wasn’t messing around.
Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation Ups the Ante for Tom Cruise
As promised, Mission: Impossible makes another appearance on this list, but this time, it’s Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation. Needless to say, the entire series is pretty stunt-heavy. That’s one of the main draws of the franchise, because it manages to pull off amazing stunts that other franchises either fake or don’t even bother attempting in the first place.
Rogue Nation’s airbus takeoff set piece is one of the most memorable parts of any Mission: Impossible movie. This iconic opening features Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt clinging to the back of an Airbus A400M Atlas military transport aircraft as it takes off and climbs into the sky, reaching 5,000 feet. Again, Cruise actually performed this stunt himself, and it took eight flights to perfect it. Christopher McQuarrie coordinated the stunt, which required months of preparation.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Features the Franchise’s Most Intense Stunt
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning is the final time we’ll mention the Mission: Impossible franchise on this list, but it would be remiss not to mention the incredible motorcycle jump featured in this movie. Dead Reckoning had a massive budget of around $400 million. Unfortunately, Dead Reckoning hit theaters at the worst possible time, arriving mere weeks before both Barbie and Oppenheimer, but it’s still a phenomenal installment in the franchise.
Fallout‘s best stunt is a classic motorcycle jump, but with a twist. Tom Cruise rode a custom Honda CRF motocross bike off a cliff on Helsetkopen Mountain in Norway. The cliff stood at an impressive and intimidating 4,000 feet, and Cruise drove the bike off the cliff, free-falling, and then finally deploying a BASE parachute after jumping off the bike. This stunt has been deemed the most dangerous in Hollywood history.
Mad Max: Fury Road Takes the Top Stunt Spot
Mad Max: Fury Road is, perhaps, the greatest R-rated action and sci-fi film ever made, and it’s hard to claim it isn’t one continuous dangerous feat of stuntwork after another. Since the entire film is more or less one giant car chase with multiple vehicles and people working in carefully refined coordination. The most impressive segment of this overly ambitious film is the polecat chase.
During an intense, multi-vehicle race scene through an open desert, numerous stunt performers sway on 30-foot-tall steel poles attached to speeding vehicles, moving at up to 60mph. The counter-weighted steel poles were mounted on heavily armored vehicles that pursued Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa and the escaped brides she was attempting to free from warlord Immortan Joe. Just watching these incredible Cirque du Soleil performers on the poles is enough to make audiences hide their eyes behind their own hands.