On March 1, the 2026 Actor Awards (that’s still so weird to type) will include two of the few major honors for stuntwork. The Award for Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture, and the same for a Stunt Ensemble in a Television Show. That got the IndieWire Craft team thinking about some of the trickiness and nuance behind stunt performances and their excellence — what are we really talking about there?
Is it about honoring the team capable of the most extreme physical feats captured on film? Or is it more about the level of beauty, intricacy, and artistry in a given stunt, like a cinematography conversation but with even more harnesses and carabiners? Or is it even more of a question of direction and how integrally a stunt sequence contributes to the film or show its in? Or something else?
None of these are the wrong answers, either. Really great stunts tick all of those boxes, and sometimes one of them is way more important to the success of a film or show than the others. But it’s not always clear, even when stuntwork is being honored, what aspect of the incredibly demanding and complex discipline is in the spotlight. So, since nobody stopped us, and since there will be a Best Stunt Design Oscar in 2028, we decided to play a similarly speculative game to our fictitious Best Casting winners of the 21st Century and guess who would be nominated for a Best Stunt Design award from the crop of 2025 films.
Now, before we just give it to the biplane sequence from “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning,” it’s worth thinking about what we at IndieWire, at least, mean when we’re talking about great Stunt Design.
Because, OK — I, Sarah Shachat, will never get over watching some behind-the-scenes footage for the “Assassin’s Creed” movie and how they did the stunt for the iconic “Leap of Faith” from the video game. It’s so impressive! Stuntman Damien Wells performed a 125 freefall at over 60 miles per hour, and they got it on film. But when you look at that scene in the movie… you’d never be able to tell. And not in a good way. It’s smoky. It’s colorless. Because there’s very little tactile detail for the viewer’s eye to grab onto and because of the way the camera moves, it looks like CGI, even though it isn’t.
Which is all to say that the Academy will do whatever it wants (and eligibility rules for the Stunt Design Oscar aren’t dropping until 2027), but the first rule we are imposing is that the stunts have to be both physically and visually impressive. We want to be able to tell we’re watching real people do real things.
The second rule is that this is going to be limited to the stunt design in action films. There are great and often invisible stunts in movies you wouldn’t ever think about having them — of course, A$AP Rocky had a double when it came time to fall through that flooded apartment flooring in “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You” — and there is artform to that. But we’re going to look at films where the action is integral to the progression of the story and the means by which protagonists solve both their physical and emotional problems.
The third rule is that we are looking at the stunt design of a particular sequence. The nominees don’t have to have the most stunts or even the stunts with the highest degree of physical difficulty. What they have to have is one or more outstanding stunt sequences where architecting, coordinating, and executing them safely makes or breaks the movie around them. We’re talking about the Octoboss drag race in “Furiosa” and the overhead shootout sequence in “John Wick.”
The fourth rule, as always, is that this is for fun.
Now, with that, here would be our 2026 nominees for Best Stunt Design.
“Ballerina”
Stunt Coordinator: Stephen Dunlevy
The Sequence: Fighting fire with flamethrowers
Why: You rarely think of flamethrowers as tactical weapons, but hey, the “John Wick” franchise is nothing if not creative. “Ballerina” has a ton of great instances of gun-fu and even some duelling grenades that are sharply and spectacularly choreographed by Stephen Dunlevy and his team. The flamethrower fight pulls at the audience’s collars just as a matter of logistics — we haven’t seen a lot like this before and can’t quite anticipate the rhythm of the sequence. The progression of it is very creative, showcasing Ana de Armas’s scrappy Eve problem-solving in real time. It’s a great partnership between stunts, camera, and sound design (they’re almost using lightsaber noises) to help us really feel it.
“F1”
Stunt Coordinator: Gary Powell
The Sequence: Monza GP
Why: It’s handy that “F1” had so much race footage from the actual cars and teams on the grid and even snuck their modified F2 cars into some of the functions of real F1 races to double as the fictional Apex GP. But Joshua Pearce’s (Damson Idris) crash at Monza had to be fully constructed — and it is well constructed indeed. Gary Powell and his team had to deal with a lot of variables to make that sequence look seamless, including rocketing a (empty) car into one of the corners at Brands Hatch, fire and crane work, and integration with F1 cars going 200 miles per hour around corners. It is definitely the stuntiest, most “Hollywood” moment in a film that’s trying to play-act at racing, but it’s a great stunt.
“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning”
The Sequence: Hanging out on some biplanes
Stunt Coordinator: Wade Eastwood
Why: I mean, we watch Tom Cruise getting tossed around in the air on the side of not one but two airplanes. It’s unreal. Please watch it if you haven’t yet. The honest truth is that what’s impressive isn’t the Tom Cruise of it all, either, although he’s the only man in the world who could anchor a sequence like this. Cruise will continue to come as close as he can to dying on camera as possible, as evidenced by the fact that we also could have picked the submarine fight from later in this same film! It’s Wade Eastwood and his team for figuring out the logistics of even how to do this safely, from wind direction to particle inhalation to preventing bird strikes. They did. And it looks absolutely incredible.
“One Battle After Another”
The Sequence: All the car chases are so good, but this one is great.
Stunt Coordinator: Brian Machleit
Why: Look, a lot of the fun of the sequence in its buildup is about location, shot framing, and editing, but it also requires getting the timing of the driving and the ultimate stunts exactly right. It’s quieter and lower intensity than all our other fake nominees — no stakes, no flamethrowers — but it really requires a lot of Teanna Taylor in particular, and therefore a lot of training for and building around what the actors are able to do. Brian Machleit does this flawlessly, with driving stunts into traffic so teeth-grindingly manic and tense you’ll need a new night guard.
“Sinners”
The Sequence: The vampires find their invite
Stunt Coordinator: Andy Gill
Why: This! Scene! Has! Everything! Fire! Guns! A lot of blood and weird vampire goo! Two Michael B. Jordans! We are giving “Sinners” a little bit of award sweeps respect here, given that it’s nominated for so many other things, but if there were a stunts category already, it would deserve an entry for this great hand-to-hand melee. Andy Gill and his team do one of the hardest things you can do in this kind of scrum, where chaos is part of the point, and there are a lot of main characters to keep track of: they maintain the momentum of the fight, and make dawn seem a hell of a long way off.
