It’s official; Furious 7 is a smash hit, a monster at the box office. In fact, last weekend, the franchise juggernaut reeled in an ASTONISHING $340+ million worldwide. That would naturally lead us all to wonder: how in the hell did the 7th movie in this series become so popular?
The answer to that is… they amped up the action sequences to an absolutely INCREDIBLE degree.
Stunt driver Jack Gill prepares for takeoff. During his career, he’s broken 23 bones, punctured a lung, and lost part of a finger.
Just take a look at the behind the scenes footage above. In the video, we see stunt coordinators dropping vehicles from C-130 airplanes. These drops start at about 12,000 feet, allowing the vehicles and accompanying cameramen to free fall for about 7,000 feet until they release their parachutes at about 5,000 feet. Not surprisingly, it’s a stressful job that takes a ton of planning.
“We have to be very precise on our hittings and our altitude,” says Jeremiah Beaudin– C-130 co-pilot. “We have to calculate specific a drop point, so the vehicles are not hitting people on the ground down there.”
In an interview with NPR’s Arun Rath, stunt driver Jack Gill echoed that sentiment, saying, “When you’re first putting it together, you’re thinking of all the things that can go wrong. That’s the issue you’re always dealing with.”
“We talked about it for a long time before we actually went out there and decided to pull the trigger, because trying to get this many cars out of the plane together — and they all had to fall in succession, one right after another — if one falls a little faster than the other, you’ve got problems. So, you know, there was a rehearsal period of about two weeks where all we did was just drop cars out of C-130s with parachutes so we could figure out how we’re going to do this.”
In the end, all of the preparation and daredevil tactics certainly paid off, as Furious 7 is currently 2015’s biggest hit with more sequels planned for the future.
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