Hollywood makes stunts and the danger they bring look effortless. The car flips, the exploding buildings, the actor walks away without a scratch. And the audience never sees the months of preparation, the safety protocols, or in some cases, the moments when everything that was supposed to go right went catastrophically wrong. These six movie stunts did not go according to plan.
6. Tom Cruise — Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018)
Tom Cruise is famous for doing his own stunts, and most of the time that commitment produces incredible cinema. During the filming of Fallout, he jumped between two buildings in London and didn’t quite clear the landing, slamming his foot into the side of the building and breaking his ankle on camera. The injury is actually visible in the final cut of the film. You can even see him hobble away after impact. Production shut down for several weeks while he recovered, and Cruise later said it was the most pain he’d ever been in on a set. He came back and finished the movie anyway, which is incredibly admirable and nutty.
5. Jackie Chan — Armour of God (1986)
Jackie Chan has been injured so many times on set that his filmography essentially doubles as a medical history. But the stunt that nearly ended everything happened during the filming of Armour of God, when he fell from a tree and fractured his skull. A piece of bone was pushed into his brain, and he required immediate emergency surgery. Chan survived, but he has a permanent hole in his skull and a hearing aid in one ear as a result. The fact that he continued doing his own stunts after that says everything you need to know about the man.
4. Vic Morrow — Twilight Zone: The Movie (1982)stunts
This one has no silver lining. During a night shoot for Twilight Zone: The Movie, actor Vic Morrow and two child actors were killed when a helicopter crashed onto the set during an explosion sequence. The tragedy led to a landmark legal case, sweeping changes to child labor laws on film sets, and a permanent shift in how the industry approaches safety protocols during dangerous shoots. Director John Landis faced criminal charges, though he was ultimately acquitted. The accident remains one of the darkest moments in Hollywood history.
3. Brandon Lee — The Crow (1993)
Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, was 28 years old and just days away from finishing production on The Crow when he was fatally shot on set. A fragment of a bullet had become lodged in a prop gun during a previous scene without anyone noticing, and when the gun was fired during Lee’s final scenes, the fragment discharged and struck him. He died after hours of surgery. The film was completed using existing footage and visual effects and released posthumously. It went on to become a cult classic, which makes the whole story feel even more heartbreaking. The tragedy directly accelerated industry-wide reform of firearm safety on film sets, a conversation that gained renewed urgency decades later.
2. Halle Berry — Die Another Day (2002)
During the filming of Die Another Day, Halle Berry inhaled a fig that became lodged in her throat during a scene and began choking. Pierce Brosnan performed the Heimlich maneuver on her and dislodged it. It wasn’t a stunt in the traditional sense, but it was a genuine on-set emergency that could have turned fatal in seconds. Berry has spoken about it casually in interviews since, but the fact that it happened during what was supposed to be a routine filming day is the part that sticks with you.
1. Sylvester Stallone — Rocky IV (1985)
Sylvester Stallone told Dolph Lundgren to actually hit him for the filming of their fight scene in Rocky IV. Lundgren obliged, and Stallone ended up in the ICU for four days with his heart slamming against his chest wall due to the blunt force trauma. His blood pressure reportedly hit 260, and he was airlifted to a hospital in California from a shoot in Canada. The injury kept him out of action for weeks, and it happened because a director decided that realism was worth the risk. Rocky IV made $300 million at the box office, so Stallone at least got something out of it.