Reports about Anne Hathaway‘s stunt double having driven her Catwoman chopper right into an IMAX camera yesterday (i.e., Monday) on the set of The Dark Knight Rises don’t say if the camera was totalled or partly damaged or what. The TMZ Video shows the bike hitting the camera at a relatively slow speed, and that some of the damage (whatever it amounts to) will be from the IMAX camera having been dropped by the cameraman.
What does an IMAX camera cost? $350,000? A half million? Even if was completely destroyed (which I doubt), keep two things in mind: (1) There’s a mention on The Dark Knight‘s iMDB page that “while filming [a] chase scene with the Joker and the SWAT vans, one of only four IMAX cameras in the world at that time was destroyed.” And (2) this pales compared to the 1958 incident on the set of Ben-Hur when a $100,000 65mm camera was totally destroyed during the filming of the chariot race. The Dollartimes inflation converter says a 1958 dollar would be worth $7.72 in 2011, so the smashed Ben-Hur camera cost filmmakers the equivalent of $772,000.