The most amount of animals used for one single movie
Cinema is a tough old business, just ask the likes of Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Francis Ford Coppola, who have each struggled to bring their creations to life. Making a standard feature film starring experienced actors is bad enough, but when you start to use child stars and even animals, it increases the chance that something might go wrong during the making of your movie.
Of course, this hasn’t stopped filmmakers from using animals on countless occasions throughout the history of cinema. Yet, more often than not, they make things far easier for themselves by using life-size props, such as when Steven Spielberg created a model shark for his 1975 blockbuster Jaws or when the same director used revolutionary animatronics to recreate the size and scale of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
Other filmmakers take far more risks, however, with a real pig being used in the making of the beloved children’s movie Babe in 1995, and the dog Toto being a key fixture in Victor Fleming’s seminal Wizard of Oz.
Such was taken to the extreme, however, in 1981 with the release of Roar, a film that used multiple real-life lions on set, resulting in over 70 people being injured on set. Speaking about the film years after its release, lead star John Marshall stated, “I don’t regret it. I’m just saying, intellectually, this film should never have been done…These are wild animals. You should not be with wild animals.”
Whilst Roar is certainly a wild piece of filmmaking in more ways than one, critics could look upon 1956’s Around the World in Eighty Days as being even more dangerous, using a total of 8,552 animals on the set of the movie.
Costing just under $6million to put together, which is about $67m in today’s money when adjusted for inflation, the film used 112 locations in 13 countries, with producer Michael Todd visiting every single country portrayed in the film. Based on the novel by Jules Verne, the film starred David Niven as Phileas Fogg, a man who makes a bet that he can circumnavigate the globe in just 80 days in 1872.
According to the Guinness World Records, as well as lead stars Niven, Shirley MacLaine, Peter Lorre and Frank Sinatra, the film also featured “3,800 sheep, 2,448 buffalo, 950 donkeys, 800 horses, 512 monkeys, 17 bulls, 15 elephants, six skunks and four ostriches”.
Take a look at the trailer for Around the World in Eighty Days below, which would go on to win the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’. It was a controversial decision in a year which included other such classics as George Stevens’ Giant and Walter Lang’s The King and I.
