Hollywood and the automobile industry have enjoyed a close working relationship for decades; when Steve McQueen zipped through the streets of San Francisco in his Mustang Fastback in 1968’s Bullit, our idea of the roles cars were capable of playing in film was forever changed.
As Subaru has grown more ubiquitous in the last fifteen years, it's deepened its involvement in the Hollywood scene, with its number of film appearances steadily continuing to rise. In particular, the WRX has become a go-to choice for filmmakers to show off their flare for car chase and stunt sequences. But did you realize Subaru's filmography stretches back over four decades?
Here are five iconic moments when the Subaru became the star of the silver screen:
The Cannonball Run (1981)
This earliest appearance of a Subaru in a mainstream American film comes in 1981’s action comedy The Cannonball Run. Both a box office hit and an object of critical ire, the madcap movie featured Jackie Chan and Michael Hui driving a 1980 DL 4WD Hatchback to win a cross-country car race against a star-studded slew of eccentric competitors.
Each team of drivers had personality quirks and/or gadgets in their vehicles that helped differentiate them from one another. Chan and Hui’s Subaru was presented as a high-tech, computer-driven machine with a rocket booster engine and infrared sensors that could be deployed for racing at night. 42 year old spoilers: they do not win the race, though things do get, uh, complicated.
Fast and Furious (2009)
The Subaru Impreza WRX STI has been a fixture of Hollywood’s longest running street racing/heist/family values franchise, The Fast and the Furious, for over a decade. The 2011 model was used in Fast Five, a 2012 in Furious 7, and a 2015 model was showcased in The Fate of the Furious.
But it all began with 2009’s Fast and Furious, the fourth film in the series. In the back half of the movie, Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner picks up a modified 2008 Subaru Impreza WRX STI hatchback from a police impound lot. The climax of the film sees Walker navigating the WRX through Mexico as he evades various drug dealers, a sequence that forms the connective tissue between the earlier Fast films’ focus on street racing and signature action-espionage set pieces the franchise would soon become best known for.
Born To Race (2011)
Racing video games Forza and Gran Turismo (which recently got a movie adaptation of its own) are held in such high regard by motorheads thanks to the level of detail the developers pay to the vehicles. After all, it's easier to respect a game’s commitment to realism when its makers have a notable hold on aesthetic details and engine specifics. Similar compliments were paid to the 2011 film Born To Race – though the praise pretty much stopped there. A direct-to-video release, Born To Race is most memorable today for the generous amount of screen time it granted its protagonist’s 2004 WRX STI.
Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)
The custom Subaru WRX found in this British action franchise went on sale in 2018, and in doing so, revealed a few secrets about Hollywood's occasionally extreme auto-modification process. For starters, the engine is found not beneath the car’s hood, but in its trunk. More curiously, there are two steering wheels found in the interior: one in the driving spot, and one in the passenger-side seat.
The second wheel was added to accommodate the film's script, which sees the WRX evading authorities by driving backwards through narrow roads at a high speed. Rather than manually try to pull off this stunt, the filmmakers decided to cut off the WRX’s body, flip it 180 degrees, and reattach it. Therefore, the real wheel is in the rear seat facing the trunk, while the wheel we see in front of the driver’s seat is nothing more than a fancy Hollywood prop.
Baby Driver (2017)
The first scene of Edgar Wright’s vehicular thriller sets such a high-octane standard that the rest of the film arguably never catches up. What’s most remarkable about the “Bellbottoms”-set opening heist getaway is that the true star of the scene isn’t Ansel Elgort’s eponymous Baby, but rather his trusted Subaru WRX.
True, Baby takes us through a highlight reel of things you shouldn’t actually attempt in a Subaru or any vehicle, including drifting and shifting gears at high speeds. (Both can potentially damage your car's undercarriage or battery). But in the movie, Baby's WRX is able to handle everything he throws at it, no matter how ill-advised... and makes it look sexy in the process.
While you should continue leaving the stunts to the professionals, that doesn’t mean you don’t belong behind the wheel of a new, used, or certified pre-owned Subaru. At New Motors Subaru, we're here to take care of all your service needs, from oil changes to brake inspections. Even when it looks like your ride has been in the middle of a dramatic high-speed chase, we have the means to get you back on the road.
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