Inside the Bourne Stuntacular, the theme park take on high-impact spycraft

The espionage story has infiltrated every medium, but rarely does the public see secret agents take to a lit stage. That’s not the playwrights fault; with all due respect to the popular Broadway version of The 39 stepsa ridiculous rewiring from both an early 20th century spy novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s own 1935 man-on-the-run adaptation, the theater doesn’t exactly require the stealth and physical brutality required of 00 agents. And as we know, Cirque du Soleil is firmly in team Avatarso those acrobats haven’t had any help telling spy sagas on stage.

This is what makes The Bourne Stuntacular such a revelation. Flying slightly under the radar at Universal Studios in Orlando – the attraction was set to launch pre-pandemic and eventually resurfaced in the fog of June 2020 when the parks reopened – the stunt show adapts the deep-seated tension of the Jason Bourne films through of a fusion of technology and practical effects performed eight times a day. Even compared to legendary shows like Disney’s Indiana Jones epic stunt spectacle and the Waterworld stunt show, nothing beats it. And that was the goal from the very beginning, when park creatives scoured the Universal licensing library for inspiration for a new show.

“We wanted to do something more than what traditional stunt shows were,” Deborah Buynak, senior vice president at Universal Orlando Resort, tells Polygon. “We wanted to be able to travel to different locations. Usually when you’re doing stunts you’re locked into the architecture and scenery of a set. Whereas if we were to move to different locations, once we can change that architecture, there’s so much you can do. It’s not always the same fistfight. It involves travel, it involves different buildings that you can swing from, jump from, and there are different types of combat going on.

Like the shaky camera legacy of the Bourne films, the Stuntacular needed to deliver rock-solid veracity on a global scale, in a package full of spycraft mumbo jumbo. Even for a theme park show, it started with a story, which Buynak said was created by a constant back-and-forth between writers, action designers, and engineers who brought years of stage R&D to market. Bourne film producer and Steven Spielberg confidant Frank Marshall assisted in the development of the Stuntacular, allowing the creative team to take elements from the original films and remix them.

The Stuntacular really starts before the show starts. Guests in line are first led to a large standing room dominated by a large screen that tells the ‘story’ of The Bourne Stuntacular. The screen features actor Julia Stiles, reprising her role as Nicky Parsons, a former logistics coordinator for Bourne’s former employers and currently one of Bourne’s few allies, who congratulates the guests on being hired as part of the “situation analysis team” of the CIA. Parsons gives a brief overview of Bourne’s backstory from the films before getting to the point: Bourne is on the run (again), and it’s up to the assembled guests to follow his movements and figure out why. To do this, the guests are led into an “observation room” (i.e. theatre) to observe Bourne’s actions “in real time” using “enhanced virtual surveillance” technology (i.e. the Stuntacular shows).

As Buynak puts it, there is no linear path to a show like the Stuntacular, in which so many elements must come together. Just like in a movie, all the elements – practical effects, stunt work, set builds, video shoot – were outsourced to different companies and then put together in a Los Angeles warehouse where the creative team could rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. And from the very beginning there was a variable, there was an X factor to make it all work, or rather a question that would take the show to the next level: how could the Stuntacular feel more immersive?

“We knew we wanted to change our point of view, like you were watching a movie,” Buynak says of the question that came up early. “But if we move the viewpoint of the camera, can we also move the viewpoint of the audience of this hands-on set sitting in front of a screen? A screen could help us to go to those different locations.”

The big twist of the Stuntacular is that instead of a static backdrop, Bourne’s new adventure takes place in front of a giant 3,640-square-foot screen. At 130 feet wide and 28 feet high, it is one of the largest structures ever built for a Universal show and benefits from technology that is silent. When I ask if the technology is comparable to Industrial Light & Magic’s Stagecraft technology, which is used in conjunction with the Unreal Engine to create digital filmable backgrounds for recent projects such as The Mandalorian, Buynak just grins and “similar to all that.” However it’s actually done, what’s clear is that the digital backdrop takes the action off the rails. And when you watch the show, you feel it.

Here’s a sneak peek: The Stuntacular opens with a scene in which Bourne makes a living as an underground prizefighter in Tangier, Morocco, before being tipped off by CIA operative Andrea Dixon that the agency has tracked his location and sent resources to neutralize him. Bourne evades his would-be attackers by deflecting gunfire and climbing over rooftops and hanging from ledges before sneaking off. The scene shifts to Bourne infiltrating the House of Defense Security, in which Bourne heads off with a Black Ops team before leading a police car on a high-speed chase through downtown Washington, D.C., once again escaping his would-be captors. Bourne ducks into an industrial building and battles a squad of guards before taking an elevator to the upper floors of the facility, dodging gunfire, and eventually escaping.

The show then skips to Dubai, where Bourne is seen battling a would-be assassin, drowning them in a nearby swimming pool before being thrown off the edge of a skyscraper. From there, he spars with a sniper dangling from a wire from the helicopter as it swings between skyscrapers and a nearby oil rig, then lands on a moving sports car, the driver of which shoots into the car’s tires. We won’t spoil the ending, but more things are going boom.

The Bourne Stuntacular is truly a stunning experience. Sean Lyle, who played Jason Bourne on a sunny afternoon earlier this spring, steps onto the stage as a character defined onscreen by Matt Damon, finding his own take on every fistfight, gunfight, perilous escape and thrilling chase – the is a legitimate act. But the screen is the real star of the show: compelling visual effects technology combined with inventive physical set pieces and cleverly timed pyrotechnics combine to create a cohesive experience.

Part of this is simply the unfathomable amount of work that goes into every second of the live performance. On top of the digital backdrops, Universal’s team uses a projection mapping system that allows an extra layer of effects to be draped over the action, forcing actors to hit precise markers, sometimes with vehicle props. It takes 13 technicians to man 70 “enable buttons” for all the effects and prompts in the Stuntacular with maximum safety.

But brutality is still key. Buynak says the Universal team cooperated Bourne supremacy And Bourne Ultimatum stunt coordinator Jeff Imada to create continuity in the franchise’s fighting styles and parkour moves. The very, very difficult part of this had nothing to do with making contact, but slowing down the action. In the DC series, a cop car (fully digital) chases Bourne (real actor), who chases him on a motorcycle (real prop) before jumping to safety on a lamppost (real lamppost). The drama then speeds up, as the street background curves along a Z axis to reveal another vantage point. Mind you, the actor freaks out in slow motion.

“What the performers need is to hold that slow motion,” says Buynak, “as they use the power of their bodies to hang, lift, and spin the lamppost – that’s almost harder for them than at full throttle. going fast because they are fighting against their own muscles and their own bodies to keep themselves in a slower state of motion than if they were just tossed around by momentum.

The IMAX-worthy spectacle of the Stuntacular is matched only by the limitless possibilities of the technology and stuntman power that brings it to life every day. And like anything supported by digital technology, it seems ripe for evolution. Although Buynak says there are no plans to change the Stuntacular in the near future – in post-pandemic times, the show they’ve been toiling for finds audiences for the first time, even three years later – but could the show get a sequel? Or should we call it a remaster?

“All those things you talked about, does it make it possible?” Buynak says. “Absolute.”