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

polygon.com:

The spy story has infiltrated every medium, but rarely do audiences see covert agents slip onto a spotlit stage. That’s not to blame playwrights; with all due respect to the hit Broadway version of The 39 Steps, a farcical rewiring of both an early-20th-century espionage novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s own 1935 man-on-the-run adaptation, the theater doesn’t exactly demand the stealth and physical brutality required of 00-agents. And as we know, Cirque du Soleil is firmly on team Avatar, so those acrobats haven’t been any help telling spy sagas on stage.

This is what makes The Bourne Stuntacular such a revelation. Flying somewhat under the radar at Universal Studios in Orlando — the attraction was set to launch pre-pandemic and eventually popped up in the fog of June 2020 when parks began to reopen — the stunt show adapts the visceral thrills of the Jason Bourne movies through a melding of technology and practical effects that’s performed eight times a day. Even compared to legendary shows like Disney’s Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular and the Waterworld Stunt Show, there’s nothing quite like it. And that was the goal from the very beginning, when park creatives began poring through the Universal license library looking for inspiration for a new show.

“We wanted to do a little 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. When doing stunts, you’re usually locked into the architecture and the scenery of a set. Whereas if we were moving to different locations, once we can change up that architecture, there’s so much you can do. It’s not the same fistfight over and over again. It involves