We love a movie car chase. Everyone does. Some films are just made by their car chases, even if they only have a small portion of time within the film. But they stay in our minds forever. As you might expect though, being able to organize and film a car chase isn’t cheap. In no world are they cheap, but how do we know what the most expensive one is. Well, one of the most iconic scenes in car movie history was the one in the Fast Five from 2011, a film that is amazingly now over ten years old.
The scene in question is the incredible Million Dollar Race, a 1/4-mile race for a million dollars that on YouTube, has an amazing 8,260,041 views at the time of writing. And that viewing figure is only likely to go higher and higher as time goes on. It doesn’t come anywhere close to the scene from Vanishing Point that cost over $1 million to make, but it is still an expensive scene and one of the most unbelievable in the movie's history with some fast cars from Dodge. And thanks to research by Compare the Market, they have worked out it cost over $200,000 to make.
The Methodology Behind The Work
Compare the Market have helpfully given us their methodology for the way they worked this out. They collated data from various sources to determine what the most well-known movie car chases were. They ranked them using YouTube views of the most relevant and most viewed video per each car chase. Following that, they worked with Car & Classic’s head of editorial, Chris Pollitt, to estimate the cost of the vehicles that we see in each car chase scene. The movie scenes are then ranked based on the estimated cost per car chase scene.
As the Compare the Market team were keen to point out, several of the featured movies used either custom or specially modified vehicles. But where the studio wouldn’t release the cost of the cars, the figures are calculated on the cost of an unmodified version of the vehicle. The Compare the Market team also took into consideration inflation with the ranking, given the deprecation in value of each older car model featured in the scenes. This led to the inflation-adjusted estimated cost, and the umber of cars involved in each movie was taken from IMCDB, the Internet Movie Cars Database.
The Million-Dollar Car Chase
This scene of course has even more significance after the passing of the late Paul Walker some years ago, and this scene is one of the best to feature Walker. During the film, Brian O’Conner, partners up with ex-con Dom Teretto played by Vin Diesel, along with a lot of other returning favorites in the cast. The team is backed into a corner in Rio de Janeiro, and they need to pull off one last heist to gain their freedom. O’Conner is a former cop so to find himself on the side of an ex-con is certainly a bit of a twist.
The scene itself features the 2011 Dodge Charger Pursuits, which as you might have guessed is a police vehicle. As you might have guessed, this was a police vehicle, used with various police forces such as the Michigan State Police. Driven by Diesel and Walker in the scene, this particular part of the film cost around $255,683 to make which is an astonishing figure but nothing compared to the $1.4 million of vanishing point. But, it has over 8 million views on YouTube which in itself is a fantastic achievement. One that should be commended by the film's makers.
A High Octane Race
The team put the high stakes on this race, with $1 million for the winner as they prepare for their last heist. As you might expect, there is a bit of, unpredictable driving involved as the team try everything to win that big money. At the end of it, we see O'Conner come out on top, although Roman Pearce played by Tyrese Gibson and Han Lue played by Sung Kang think Dom let O'Conner win by easing off the gas. O'Conner of course thinks that’s not true, but still, it is Walker’s character O’Conner who wins.
A Gripping Car Chase
The Fast Five was an interesting film within the series, as it was a transitional film within the franchise. It focussed a lot more on action scenes and brawls than it did the actual racing, which might not have appealed to everyone. But whatever the case may be, its an interesting scene and features plenty of action to garner over 8 million views on YouTube. And according to the Compare the Market, it is the second most expensive movie car chase scene in history. That alone is one fantastic claim to fame for the Fast Five.
Source: Compare the Market