1000 Amazing Action Movie Facts

By Tom Chapman

Think you know all there is to know about action movies? Well, think again.

 

1000 Amazing Action Movie Facts is chock full of fascinating and unusual facts about classic (and not so classic) action movies. Blockbusters, B-movies, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Seagal, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, superheroes, James Bond, Die Hard, Predator, Robocop, Fast and the Furious, martial arts, guns, sequels, casting, explosions, kill counts, and so on. Prepare to enter the explosive and pulse pounding world of action movies!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Feb 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9783755433675

Tom Chapman

Tom Chapman is an award-winning barber, author, public speaker, global ambassador and international educator. In 2015 he founded the Lions Barber Collective, an international group of barbers who have undergone training in how to recognise symptoms of mental ill health in clients. Tom is trained in ASIST (suicide intervention), Mental Health First Aid and SafeTalk. He has received a Points of Light award for his outstanding volunteer work and is regularly featured in the national and international press, including BBC, Channel 4, FOX News (USA) Virgin Radio and TalkSport.

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Copyright

© Copyright 2023 Luke Armitage

All Rights Reserved

Contents

Introduction

The Facts

Introduction

Think you know all there is to know about action movies? Well, think again. 1000 Amazing Action Movie Facts is chock full of fascinating and unusual facts about classic (and not so classic) action movies. Blockbusters, B-movies, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Seagal, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, superheroes, James Bond, Die Hard, Predator, Robocop, Fast and the Furious, martial arts, guns, sequels, casting, explosions, kill counts, and so on. Prepare to enter the explosive and pulse pounding world of action movies!

The Facts

(1) John McClane kills 73 people in the Die Hard franchise. 10 in Die Hard, 24 in Die Hard 2, 13 in Die Hard with a Vengeance and 13 again both in Live Free or Die Hard and A Good Day to Die Hard.

(2) Live ammunition was used in Old Hollywood movies. Bullets would be fired over the heads of actors when shooting action scenes.

(3) The first film in The Fast and the Furious franchise was originally going to be called Redline.

(4) The 1998 film The Replacement Killers, which stars Chow Yun-Fat, holds a record for the most bullets fired in a Hollywood film.

(5) The Guinness World Record for the biggest explosion in a movie is held by the Bond film Spectre. The production of Spectre used 2223 gallons of fuel for the sequence where Blofeld's desert lair is blown up.

(6) Rosa Kleb has a knife blade in her shoe in From Russia with Love. Believe it or not, this was a real weapon (or gadget if you prefer) used by the KGB.

(7) Rambo III has 132 deaths and 78 kills - making it one of the most violent movies ever made.

(8) It is estimated that Arnold Schwarzenegger's character John Matrix kills over eighty people in the classic action film Commando.

(9) Chuck Norris was completely unknown at the time of Bruce Lee's Way of the Dragon as far as acting went but he was a real life karate champion of some distinction.

His showdown with Lee inside the Colosseum in Rome is the highlight of the picture and one of the most memorable sequences Lee was ever involved in. The pair confront one another with the respect and formality of samurai warriors and an epic contest ensues. Bruce Lee cast Norris because he found that few martial artists or stuntmen were fast enough to believably fight him onscreen. Norris was different and it made their staged fight much more authentic and all the more inspired for the setting (although the Colosseum backdrop sometimes looks noticeably fake when the location footage in Rome cuts to studio interiors).

(10) James Cameron wanted to cast Bridget Fonda as an eighteen year-old Sarah Connor in the original 1984 Terminator film but when Fonda turned the part down he decided to make the character slightly older.

(11) Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot is a former Israeli Defense Forces soldier.

(12) The katana-wielding foe James Bond battles in Osato's office in You Only Live Twice is played by Peter Fanene Maivia - grandfather of Dwayne Johnson.

(13) Wings Hauser was originally cast as Bennett in Commando but replaced by Vernon Wells at the last minute. This might explain why Bennett's clothes don't seem to fit him very well!

(14) The black Interceptor driven by Mel Gibson in Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior) is a 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT Coupe. These cars are quite prized today because they were never exported to the United States at the time.

(15) The Fast and the Furious franchise nearly became a straight DVD series after the third film Tokyo Drift. The relatively modest box-office returns of the film made the studio wonder if the franchise still had a theatrical future.

(16) The legendary lobby gunfight sequence in The Matrix took ten days to shoot.

(17) During the climax to the 1983 Brian De Palma film Scarface, where Al Pacino's Tony Montana battles waves of gunmen in his mansion, some of the second unit direction was done by Steven Spielberg. Spielberg, a friend of De Palma, visited the set and ended up being deployed on the production.

(18) Patrick Swayze was supposed to play the lead character Harrigan in Predator 2 but he had to drop out after he got injured making the film Road House. Danny Glover bagged the part in the end.

(19) 1994's Speed was commonly known as Die Hard on a bus. The film tells the story of an LAPD cop who tries to rescue civilians on a city bus rigged with a bomb programmed to explode if the bus slows down. Even the poster seemed design to mimic Die Hard and the presence of Jan de Bont as director furthered the connections. Screenwriter Joss Whedon was brought in at the last hour to make the Keanu Reeves character less like John McClane and better suited to Reeves' personality.

(20) Al Pacino turned the down the part of Han Solo in Star Wars because he couldn't make head nor tail of the script.

(21) Rumble in the Bronx is a 1996 martial arts action film starring Jackie Chan and directed by Stanley Tong. After a few unsuccessful attempts to crack the US market in the past (Cannonball Run, The Protector) Rumble in the Bronx finally did the trick for Chan and his profile outside of Hong Kong flourished.

The film is set in New York (though fairly obviously shot in Vancouver) and in contrast to the later largely American based Chan films where our (older) hero is given too little to do and saddled with a comic American actor, Rumble in the Bronx concentrates on action and incredible stuntwork, feeling much closer to Chan's classic eighties Hong Kong adventures in spirit than the diluted Hollywood Jackie Chan films that followed over the years. Chan broke an ankle making the film but completed it with a cast disguised to look like a shoe!

(22) The Soviet dictator Stalin was said to be a big fan of cowboy films.

(23) The title Live Free or Die Hard is New Hampshire's state motto. Outside of the United States the film was known as Die Hard 4.0. Bruce Willis and director Len Wiseman later admitted they didn't like the title Live Free or Die Hard and would have preferred it to be released as Die Hard 4.0 in the United States too.

(24) Michelle Rodriguez couldn't actually drive in real life when she was cast in The Fast and Furious franchise.

(25) One notable veteran action star who was missing in The Expendables franchise is Steven Seagal. Seagal declined to appear in the movies because he didn't want to work with producer Avi Lerner. Seagal and Lerner had fallen out in the past and Seagal clearly still held a grudge.

(26) Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise turned down the part of Jason Bourne before it was offered to Matt Damon.

(27) The Playboy centerfold that John McClane notices on the wall in Die Hard is Pamela Stein.

(28) Under Siege is clearly a Die Hard film under another name. The ship makes a good constricted locale for the action. This film nixed early plans for Die Hard 3 to be set on a ship.

(29) Before he turned his hand to acting, action star Jason Statham was a diver. He actually competed for England at diving in the 1990 Commonwealth Games.

(30) The car chase in The French Connection was shot beneath the Stillwell Avenue tracks in Brooklyn. The director William Friedkin got in the rear of the 1971 Pontiac LeMans to do hand held camerawork. This was no task for the faint hearted because the stunt driver frequently reached 90 mph. The entire sequence took six weeks to complete.

(31) Very few of the actors playing the villains in Die Hard were German in real life. In a slight irony though, Bruce Willis was born in Germany.

(32) Believe it or not, the singer Neil Diamond was among those who auditioned to be Superman before the part went to Christopher Reeve.

(33) The tattoo on John Wick's back translates to Fortune favors the strong.

(34) The famous alley fight scene between Roddy Piper and David Keith in John Carpenter's They Live lasts for six minutes.

(35) Martial arts star Bruce Lee died at the age of 32 in July 1973. His death was completely unexpected and came as a great shock to the people of Hong Kong and China because he was more or less a superhero to them after appearing in local films like The Way of the Dragon and The Big Boss. Lee was not a star in America at the time because Enter the Dragon, the film that did make him a global star, was still a month from release at the time.

It's a great shame that Bruce Lee didn't live to see the huge success of Enter the Dragon and Hollywood would surely have beckoned if he hadn't passed away in such unexpected fashion. But what caused Bruce Lee's sudden death? How could someone who appeared to be so fit and healthy die so suddenly?

The most common explanation for his death is that he died after an allergic reaction to aspirin. His death occurred after he visited the actress Betty Ting Pe in her apartment. Lee was having an affair with Betty Ting Pe - although this fact was covered up at the time lest it should damage Lee's reputation (he was married afterall). After he complained of a headache, Betty Ting Pe gave Lee an Equagesic - a common painkiller containing aspirin and a tranquilizer known as meprobamate. Equagesic was felt to be harmless although it was discontinued in the United States after Lee's death. After taking the medicine, Lee had a lie down and never woke up. Though an ambulance was called and there were attempts to revive him he was pronounced dead in hospital.

The coroner officially ruled Bruce Lee’s death the result of a second cerebral edema (this was not the first time Lee had suffered this condition) brought on by taking Equagesic. Naturally, as no famous person can seem to die young without conspiracy theories abounding, there were plenty of these when Bruce Lee passed away. There were stories that he was killed by an organised crime group or had been the victim of a family curse (this theory is probably retrospective due to his son Brandon also tragically dying at a young age). A later theory (which doesn't seem implausible) is that Lee died of heatstroke after having sweat glands in his arm pits removed (Lee apparently hated the appearance of sweat on clothes). The day Lee died was ferociously hot in Hong Kong.

When it became public knowledge in Hong Kong that Lee had been with Betty Ting Pe when he died there were even theories that Betty Ting Pe had murdered him with poison. These theories were nonsense but Betty Ting Pe said she received death threats as a result of the gossip. Chuck Norris, who knew Bruce Lee and worked with him, suggested that muscle relaxants Lee took might have killed him. There are a lot of stories too that Bruce Lee, despite his monastic image, took a lot of recreational drugs and that these might have contributed to his demise. The death of Bruce Lee still remains something of a mystery after all these years but it appears that it was probably a natural medical demise rather than a conspiracy, murder, or outlandish supernatural curse.

(36) About three weeks before The Expendables 3 was due for release, a DVD quality print of the film was leaked on the net and downloaded over 2 million times. As you might imagine, this didn't help the movie's box-office. After an investigation conducted on both sides of the Atlantic a man was arrested in England for illegally distributing the film.

(37) Predator 2 was going to be set in New York but this was changed to Los Angeles to save money.

(38) Bruce Willis was considered for the part of Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon before it was offered to Mel Gibson.

(39) There are an estimated 307 deaths in the John Woo film Hard Boiled.

(40) MacGyver (and later Stargate) television star Richard Dean Anderson was considered for the part of John McClane in Die Hard.

(41) The Steve McQueen film Bullitt has one of the most famous car chases in cinema. Frank Bullitt’s car is a 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback. The baddies have a 1968 Dodge Charger 440 Magnum. McQueen insisted on doing as much driving as possible himself in the film - which infuriated his wife. She begged the producers to use a stunt driver.

(42) Clint Eastwood hated his 'Man with No Name' character smoking cigars in the Spaghetti Westerns because he was a non-smoker in real life and they made him feel sick.

(43) In the classic period war film Zulu, a young Michael Caine plays Lieutenant Bromhead - an officer who has never actually experienced war. In real life though Michael Caine had actually fought in the Korean War when he was in the British Army.

(44) In reality you would actually need 480 dump trucks to steal all the gold from the Federal Reserve - as happens in Die Hard with a Vengeance.

(45) Among the working titles for Die Hard 4 were Die Hard: Reset and Die Hard: Die Hardest.

(46) The Fast and Furious franchise was inspired by an article in Vibe magazine about illegal street racing in New York.

(47) On the Bond film No Time to Die, 8,400 gallons of Coca-Cola were used to make a street in Maratea less slippery for a motorbike and car stunt (the coke left a sticky residue and so gave the bike and car more grip). The producer Barbara Broccoli thought the stunt crew had gone mad when she saw that they'd covered the road in Coca-Cola so they had to explain to her why they'd done this and why they were spending a sizeable little chunk of the budget on preposterous amounts of this popular soft-drink. £55,000 was spent on Coca-Cola for this sequence. Coca-Cola, according to the stunt director, actually washed off very easily and made the streets look cleaner than they were before.

(48) Milo Ventimiglia, Freddy Rodríguez and Josh Brolin were considered for the role of Royce in Predators before it went to Adrien Brody.

(49) Ang Lee's 2000 martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a critical and financial hit and raised the bar for the genre. A sequel finally arrived in 2016, directed by Yuen Woo-ping. In the film, Michelle Yeoh's Shu Lien must travel to Peking where the Green Destiny — the legendary sword of her deceased love Li Mu Bai — is located.

This rather obscure sequel did not repeat the success of Lee's film and enjoyed not only a dismal box-office but terrible reviews. The charismatic Hong Kong star Donnie Yen is a welcome addition to the cast but the actual film is not a patch on its illustrious predecessor. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny was shot in New Zealand and makes much use of green screen CGI in a way that the original film did not. The first film was shot in China and this sequel just doesn't have the same authentic backdrops or atmosphere. The martial arts scenes in Sword of Destiny lack the majesty of the original and the film becomes something of a slog to get through in the end.

(50) Jason Statham was supposed to play the lead character Cooper in Dog Soldiers but dropped out to make Ghosts of Mars.

(51) Legend has it that Bruce Lee had to be restrained from throttling the inept director Lo Wei on the set of Fists of Fury because Wei was more interested in the racetrack than the film and would have commentary from whatever horse race he had bet on that afternoon blaring away on a loudspeaker while they were trying to shoot the picture.

(52) 1987's Robocop had to be ruthlessly cut to avoid a certificate X when originally released. Many big action films in the eighties - Predator, Die Hard - were very violent and Robocop is no exception.

(53) David Soul was cast in Starsky and Hutch on the back of appearing in the Dirty Harry film Magnum Force. A television producer saw him in the film.

(54) Beverly Hills Cop was a huge breakout film for Eddie Murphy in 1984 but it was Sylvester Stallone who was originally cast as the fish out of water Detroit policeman who gets into all manner of trouble in Beverly Hills. Stallone, to the irritation of screenwriter Dan Petrie Jr, had rewritten the script to tone down the comedy and inject more violence and action. Paramount executives had to decide whether or not to go with Stallone's script or Petrie's original concept. In the end they went with Petrie's script and Stallone left the film - just two weeks before shooting was due to commence.

(55) The absence of guns in Hong Kong martial arts films was not merely a convenient plot contrivance. Hong Kong had experienced the British tradition of strict gun control.

(56) The explosive and bombastic sequence in Predator where Schwarzenegger and his commando team destroy a rebel camp in the jungle was shot by second unit director Craig Baxley. John McTiernan, the director of the film, disliked this sequence and tried to have it removed. McTiernan felt that it didn't really fit in with the tone of the rest of the movie. Baxley had shot the sequence because he felt they needed some spectacular footage to placate worried studio executives. It eventually stayed in the film.

(57) The reason why Die Hard takes place mostly at night is because Bruce Willis was still shooting the television show Moonlighting during the day.

(58) Daniel Craig was the first James Bond actor who wasn't born before the movie franchise began.

(59) Paul Walker was born in Glendale, California, in 1973. Walker was a child actor in the 1980s and appeared in popular TV shows like Who's the Boss?, Charles in