Skip to main content

Spectre set a new Guinness World Record for film stunt explosions

James Bond’s latest adventure is breaking all kinds of box-office records right now, but the film also broke one particularly explosive record before it hit theaters. The special effects team for Spectre was awarded a Guinness World Record this week for the largest stunt explosion in cinematic history.

Spectre producer Barbara Broccoli and stars Daniel Craig and Lea Seydoux accepted the award certificate today during a press conference in Beijing, China, where the film is set to open this week. They received the award on behalf of Chris Corbould, the Oscar-winning Special Effects and Miniature Effects Supervisor on Spectre.

The scene that earned the award involved the explosion of a massive underground structure that occurs while Bond and Seydoux’s character look on from a distant hilltop. The stunt was filmed in Erfoud, Morocco, during June 2015, and required 8,418 litres of fuel and 33kg of explosives.

“It is absolutely tremendous that the Guinness World Records have recognized Chris Corbould’s incredible work in Spectre in which he created the largest explosion ever in film history,” said Broccoli and fellow Spectre producer Michael G. Wilson in a statement accompanying the announcement of the new record.

A behind-the-scenes video documenting the stunt was also released by the official James Bond channel on YouTube.

“The James Bond movies are synonymous with pushing cinematic boundaries,” said Guinness World Records Editor-in-Chief Craig Glenday in another statement. “The latest film, Spectre, has again captured the imagination of global cinemagoers, and this will certainly be due in part to the phenomenal stunts. The scene featuring the world’s largest film stunt explosion is spectacular and will live long in the memory as one of the outstanding moments in the Bond franchise.”

Spectre is in theaters now.

Editors' Recommendations

Rick Marshall
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
SpaceX’s latest launch set new record for rocket’s nose cone
A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off on May 30, for the first crewed test flight of the Crew Dragon capsule. flight

SpaceX has come a long way since it started operating nearly 20 years ago.

From the very beginning, its plan was to lower the cost of space travel by creating a launch vehicle whose parts could be reused -- including the rocket's first stage, the spacecraft, and the fairing that sits atop the rocket and houses payloads.

Read more
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT sets new world record at 3.2GHz
amd radeon rx 6900 xt new world record clock speed

Overclocker Der8auer set a new world record with the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. In a YouTube video released Wednesday, the German overclocking legend used a liquid nitrogen cooling rig to push AMD's flagship Big Navi GPU to 3.2GHz, setting a new world record for graphics card speed. The 6900 XT is already an absurdly fast graphics card with a boost clock of 2.25GHz, but Der8auer was able to take the card 1GHz beyond even its fastest speed.

The clock speed goes beyond the artificial clock limit of 3.0GHz on the 6900 XT. That's because Der8auer was using a PowerColor LiquidDevil Ultimate card, which has a clock limit of 4GHz. It uses the updated XTXH variant of the Navi 21 processor inside the 6900 XT, upping the previous version's frequency limit.

Read more
Artificial sun sets new record, running at 100 million degrees C for 20 seconds
The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR)

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) National Research Council of Science & Technology

An artificial sun built in Korea has set a new record for the longest operation, maintaining a temperature of over 100 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds.

Read more