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Who Would Win a 2026 Best Stunt Design Oscar, According to IndieWire
We'll have to wait two more years to see stunts properly acknowledged at the Oscars, but that didn't stop us from choosing our favorites of 2025.
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Who Would Win a 2026 Best Stunt Design Oscar, According to IndieWire
We'll have to wait two more years to see stunts properly acknowledged at the Oscars, but that didn't stop us from choosing our favorites of 2025.
[Best Stunt Action Sequences of 2025]
Sarah Shachat
Craft Editor
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[MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE THE FINAL RECKONING, (aka MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 8), from left: Tom Cruise, director Christopher McQuarrie, on set, 2025. © Paramount Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection]
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©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
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?
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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 DesignOscar 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.
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