This Director Wrecked More Cars Than Any Other (Bet You Already Guessed Who He Is)
Or maybe you didn't.
People easily might assume that Justin Lin, who directed five films in the Fast & Furious franchise, is holding the title of the greatest destroyer of cars in Hollywood history. But that would be wrong.
While Justin Lin is no stranger to demolishing cars in spectacular ways on the screen, the actual record is held by Michael Bay. According to calculations by fans of films and cars from Scrap Car Comparison, Michael Bay has wrecked no less that 354 cars throughout his filmography.
That makes for an average of 24 cars written off or damaged in each of the fifteen films he's directed. Unsurprisingly, a big share of all that destruction comes from his five Transformer films – 155 cars in all, or 31 per movie.
Much more remarkable is the fact that movies notable for a lot of spectacular destruction by alien robots produced the average not much higher than the figure for Michael Bay's entire career as a director.
Justin Lin is actually trailing far behind, having only wrecked a total of 135 cars, 219 less than Bay. across his ten films. Still an impressive figure, but the sheer gap clearly indicates how hard it is to rival Bay in this area.
And the third place goes to John Landis, who wrecked 120 vehicles to date. But this is almost entirely thanks to the number of cars destroyed in the Blues Brothers films, which included multiple car pile-ups, including one which holds a Guinness World Record for the largest car pile-up on film. Those however, were done for the purposes of comedy, not hard-boiled action.
Other directors notable for large amounts of wrecked cars include Christopher Nolan, The Russo brothers and John Woo – but none of them even managed to cross the hundred mark.
In the number of total wrecks which were written off, Bay is unmatched as well – he spent studio money on 279 cars next to Lin's second place of 100 cars. And if we look at cars that were only damaged, Bay racks up 75 repairable car wrecks, against Christopher Nolan in the second spot with 44.
All in all, even if another director is going to get the same budget as Transformers, to spend on cars to be destroyed, he would have hard time matching Bay's sheer passion for car-wrecking.