Fact Check: This terrifying car accident is from the shooting of ‘The Gray Man’

A video making the rounds on social media shows a speeding black car, crashing into two cars parked at the side of a busy road, demolishing them, and ultimately toppling. Many on the footpath could be seen fleeing and crouching as the vehicles hit by the car shattered.

The text inside the video, loosely translated from Punjabi to English, read: “Which car is this? Thank God nobody was sitting in the parked cars. INDIA.” An archived version of this post can be seen here.

India Today found that this video is neither from India, nor does it show a real incident. This video shows the shooting of a scene in a movie called “The Gray Man” in Prague.

Our Probe

A reverse search of keyframes from the viral video led us to an extended version of the video in question. The caption in Czech read, “Filming in Prague”. In this clip, people could be seen standing still for a while on the footpath. After a few seconds, people start walking and vehicles start moving on the road, followed by the black car that crashed right into the two parked cars.

Moreover, this clip clearly showed vehicles carrying cameras and huge equipment on the road, suggesting that it was indeed a film shoot. Many people shared this video back in August 2021.

Further, we found another video of this scene shot from a different angle on YouTube. In the comments, we found a person stating that this clip is from a movie called “The Gray Man”.

With the help of this clue, we found that “The Gray Man” is a 2022 American action thriller film, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, based on the 2009 novel of the same name by Mark Greaney. The film stars Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and Indian actor Dhanush. We found an interview of the Russo Brothers about this movie on the official YouTube account of “Netflix: Behind the Streams”. In this clip, we could spot the exact same scene featuring the black car crashing into the parked vehicles and then overturning on the road.

Further, we found behind-the-scenes footage of 12 dangerous sequences of “The Gray Man”, shared on the YouTube channel of “TheThings.” The video in question of the car accident was shared here as well as the “Tram” scene.

We then found a website called “Filmpraha1” that lists the filming locations of movies shot in the Czech Republic, and details about the ongoing shootings. According to the information given here, “The Gray Man” was filmed in the streets of the Prague 1 district in June and July 2021. An article in Screen Rant also stated the same.

Thus, it is clear that the filming of an action scene of a movie in Prague was falsely shared as a real accident in India.