John Woo is currently in China filming Red Cliff. At $80 million dollars, it is easily the most expensive Chinese film ever produced (the budget should go as far there as $300 million or so would go in North America). The film is about the infamous battle of a Red Cliff in which a massive army was toppled by a much smaller one due to strategy and ingenuity. The production is said to be so large and ambitious that the movie might be split into two parts for its theatrical release. The subject matter is intriguing and it will certainly be fascinating to see what John Woo can do with that scale of a production and such a massive budget. There was nothing but hype and excitement surrounding the project...until now. Woo has gone and pulled a John Landis. A stuntman been killed during filming.

The crew attempted to pull off a stunt that was far too dangerous to do without CGI. The plan was to crash a full size battleship engulfed in flames into another battleship. Both ships were filled with stuntmen…it should have been fairly easy to figure out that this wasn’t going to end well. Apparently the flames grew out of control and both ships quickly caught on fire. Stuntmen and crewmembers frantically tried to abandon the ships before anyone got hurt, but to no avail. When the wreckage was cleared, one stuntman had died and six other crewmembers were rushed to the hospital with serious injuries. It’s a tragic event that has shut down production and will inevitably hurt the reputation of the finished film.