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On April 3 movie theatres worldwide screened the most awaited franchise of the year Fast and Furious 7: One Last Drive. Fans thronged the theatre for one last look at Paul Walker and left teary-eyed as the credits rolled. Well, let's turn our attention to the four-wheeled stars of the movie, who are probably by this time turned to scrap at their last resting place at Bonnie Car Crushers.
Few weeks before the movie released teasers and videos explained how the airplane jump and the building car chase sequence was filmed. Reports quote that almost 230 cars were bodily harmed in the making of Fast & Furious 7. They were raced off ramps, parachuted from airplanes and driven headlong into each other.
For the seventh instalment in the multi-million dollar joy-riding franchise, the emphasis was on real stunts, so you can imagine the cars used were also real. So which garage will be housing these 230 cars? Sorry, no garage – it’s the scrapyard for these beauties.
Soon after the filming of the movie Richard Jansen in Colorado Springs received a phone call asking him if his company Bonnie Car Crushers buys junk cars. A reply in the affirmative led to him getting a huge order. Bonnies Car Crushers was asked to haul away 20 or 30 vehicles smashed beyond repair, including several black Mercedes-Benzes, a Ford Crown Victoria and a Mitsubishi Montero.
Jansen and his crew, based in nearby Penrose, spent several days loading the cars to haul them away. Filmmakers insisted he shred or crush them all, to prevent anyone from fixing one up and getting hurt in a damaged movie car.
Dennis McCarthy, picture car coordinator for the “Fast and the Furious” franchise, explained the reason for such stringent methods, “The film crew has to follow a specific protocol, documenting every step for both accounting and liability reasons, he says. “We have to account for every single car destroyed in each film. Fast and Furious filmmakers wreck hundreds of cars every movie—more than 230 alone for Furious 7. For 2013’s Fast & Furious 6, when a tank bursts out of a military transport and flattens numerous cars on a highway in Tenerife Island, Spain, we made deals with local junkyards and used-car lots. We’d wreck 25 cars a day, they’d come out at night, scoop ‘em up and bring us 25 more.”
So there you have it, Hollywood action movies have evolved into something much bigger and so extra precaution is being taken so that a fan does not make away with a beat up movie car in the hope of collecting it or selling it.
