Best action movies of the 2020s so far

The shot that broke the internet wasn’t a superhero catching a falling skyscraper. It was a man in a black suit, bleeding from a dozen wounds, falling down 222 stone steps in Paris, dragging himself upright, and walking back up to do it all again. March 2023. John Wick had been shot, stabbed, driven over, and kicked down more flights than an Escher painting, and audiences—real, popcorn-clutching, breath-holding audiences—could not look away. That staircase sequence in John Wick: Chapter 4 became an instant action canon event. It wasn’t just viral. It was a statement. A decade that started in lockdown, with theaters dark and cameras frozen, had somehow produced one of the most tactile, punishing, and beautifully choreographed action spectacles in film history. We are halfway through the 2020s, and we are swimming in remarkable action cinema. The question isn’t whether there’s been a good one lately. The question is whether we’re living through a genre renaissance nobody saw coming.

A decade nobody predicted: how the 2020s redefined action cinema

On paper, the 2020s should have been a disaster for action movies. The pandemic shuttered multiplexes. Tentpole schedules collapsed. Streamers gobbled up mid-budget thrillers and spit them out as background noise. The superhero machine—dominant for nearly 15 years—began sputtering in real time. And yet something unexpected happened. We got Top Gun: Maverick grossing $1.495 billion worldwide without a single alternate universe. We got a Malaysian laundromat owner and her tax-auditor-slash-husband battling a multiverse bagel in Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film so violent and tender it won Best Picture. We got an Indian revolutionary swinging a tiger in RRR, a Ghanaian-American stuntman turned debut director in Monkey Man, and Bob Odenkirk—Bob. Odenkirk.—becoming a genuine action star in Nobody.

To understand what happened, you have to look at the who, the when, and the why all at once. The who: a cohort of filmmakers and stunt professionals who came up through the 87North production banner, the lineage of Jackie Chan’s Hong Kong stunt teams, and the axis of practical-effects diehards trained by the likes of Christopher Nolan and George Miller. Chad Stahelski, the director of all four John Wick films, began his career as Keanu Reeves’ stunt double on The Matrix. David Leitch, Stahelski’s co-director on the first Wick and the force behind Atomic Blonde, Bullet Train, and The Fall Guy, was a stunt coordinator for decades. These were people who had spent their careers in the margins, and when they got the keys, they drove the machine straight toward physical, in-camera mayhem.

The when: a post-pandemic audience ravenous for collective experience, for movies that could be felt in a dark room full of strangers. The why: streaming economics forced a new clarity. Netflix needed action that popped on a home screen, and they greenlit the Russo brothers’ Extraction, a film whose 12-minute oner—stitched together with hidden cuts but performed with brutal intent—racked up 99 million views in its first four weeks. Amazon bought MGM. Apple went after prestige action like The Gray Man. Meanwhile, theatrical distribution was suddenly brave. A period action comedy in Telugu? RRR broke out of its South Indian base to become a global phenomenon because the film operated on a register of pure, joyful excess no American studio would have greenlit.

This isn’t a listicle. It’s an attempt to map what the best action films of the 2020s tell us about craft, about hunger, and about what audiences actually want when they pay for a ticket. The answer, it turns out, is not more pixels. It’s more sweat.

The architecture of motion: what made the 2010s so brittle

To understand the current moment, you have to acknowledge how hollow action filmmaking had become. The 2010s gave us a decade of shaky-cam incoherence, weightless digital doubles, and color-graded sludge. Paul Greengrass’s Bourne sequels had revitalized action with frenetic intimacy, but the copycats lost the thread. Quick cuts became a crutch. Editors sliced every punch into three frames of indecipherable motion. The aesthetic logic of “making it feel real” had curdled into “making it impossible to follow.”

At the same time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe became the world’s most profitable machine for turning charismatic actors into floating light blobs. The airport fight in Captain America: Civil War in 2016 was a turning point for many—technically impressive, emotionally empty, zero stakes. Superhero fatigue wasn’t really about too many capes. It was about action sequences that felt pre-rendered in a boardroom. Meanwhile, older action stars aged out. The Expendables nostalgia cycle ran dry. The Fast & Furious franchise drifted from street racing to outer space. For a while, it looked like practical action cinema was going to be a boutique taste, kept alive only by Gen X auteurs like Nolan and occasional oddities like Mad Max: Fury Road.

But Fury Road mattered. It won six Oscars. It turned a decade of greenscreen noise into visual silence. And in 2014, an original, mid-budget revenge film called John Wick opened to quiet praise and a respectable $86 million worldwide. Nobody knew it yet, but the corpse of practical action was about to kick the coffin open.

The groundwork was laid in stunt gyms across Los Angeles, in the Hong Kong tradition of “wire-fu” that Ang Lee had brought to American multiplexes with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and in the growing international market for films that didn’t depend on English dialogue. Korean action thriller The Man from Nowhere (2010), the Indonesian The Raid films (2011, 2014), the Thai Ong-Bak—these became underground touchstones that Hollywood creatives watched on repeat. The Raid’s director, Gareth Evans, and star Iko Uwais became legends in action circles. The exchange of fight philosophy from East to West had never really stopped. It just needed a mainstream American vehicle to strap it to the hood.

What the experts and the craftspeople are saying

When you talk to people who make action movies for a living, they draw a hard line between spectacle and movement. Scott Adkins, the British martial artist and actor behind the Undisputed series and Boyka, has been blunt in interviews: an audience can feel when a punch is digital. It lands differently in the body. “Performance,” Adkins said in a 2020 roundtable, “is as important in a fight as it is in a close-up. If the actor isn’t doing the move, the camera hides it with a cut. We’re trying to undo 20 years of hiding.”

Directors now speak openly about their stunt teams like co-authors. Chad Stahelski has described the action in John Wick: Chapter 4 as “dialogue with the audience,” where every gunshot, headshot, and judo throw delivers narrative information. When Keanu Reeves reloads in the middle of a fight scene and discards a weapon because it’s empty—not because it looks cool—the audience subliminally trusts the world they’re in. “The choreography is the script,” Stahelski told The Hollywood Reporter. “You don’t cut away from emotion because a punch is happening.”

From the critic’s side, the response has been surprisingly unified. Justin Chang, film critic for The New Yorker and LA Times veteran, wrote after a festival screening of Monkey Man that “the most politically alive action film in years works because its violence is personal, not programmatic.” Chang’s observation captures why these movies land differently: the hero bleeds, and we see it happen in wide shot. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times has repeatedly championed the “magnificent physicality” of films like RRR, arguing that the scale of their spectacle reconnects audiences to a pre-digital sense of wonder.

Industry analysts are tracking a box office pattern that supports these artistic judgments. David A. Gross, who runs the movie consultancy Franchise Entertainment Research, notes that post-2021, the highest-grossing action films skew strongly toward practical stunts and legacy stars. Top Gun: Maverick isn’t just a sequel—it’s a Tom Cruise mission statement. Gross told Variety that audiences are “rewarding authenticity with their wallets in a way that was harder to measure a decade ago, when CG-driven action had novelty.” The data backs this: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One earned $567 million worldwide despite opening against Barbenheimer. John Wick 4 did $440 million, more than double the first film’s total. These aren’t just niche hits. They’re mainstream corrections.

And then there are the fans. The r/movies and r/actioncinema communities on Reddit, the ShotByShot breakdown accounts on Twitter/X, the stunt-performer analysis channels on YouTube—these are not passive consumers. They frame-by-frame every sequence. They spot when a punch doesn’t connect. They create supercuts of practical stunts that go viral independently of the films they promote. The fan voice is righteous about one thing: credit. When The Fall Guy opened in May 2024, it was praised not just for its Gosling-Blunt chemistry but for its meta-plot centered on a stunt performer, and for actually naming and celebrating the real stunt pros who did the work. Lee Morrison, the stunt coordinator, saw his name trend on TikTok. That matters. That hadn’t happened before.

Where the numbers put their money

The box office tells a story. Top Gun: Maverick’s $1.49 billion global haul made it the second-highest-grossing film of 2022 behind Avatar: The Way of Water. More striking: its domestic total of $718 million surpassed every Marvel film that year—including Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. That’s a Tom Cruise vehicle, based on a 36-year-old IP, with no superpowers and no CGI dogfighting. The US Navy sequences were shot inside actual F/A-18 Super Hornets, with cameras mounted in cockpits and the actors operating them under extreme G-force. Paramount’s marketing leaned hard into that reality, and audiences responded.

The numbers for Everything Everywhere All at Once are a different kind of signal. Produced for roughly $25 million, it grossed $140 million globally and became A24’s highest earner. That a film featuring dildo fights, googly-eyed rocks, and a martial-arts master in a fanny pack could cross the $100 million mark in North America alone shattered any assumption that avant-garde action is commercially toxic. The film’s fight choreographer, the martial arts team known as Martial Club, integrated traditional kung fu with the chaotic aesthetic of the Daniels’ directing style. It was messy, human, and absolutely specific.

Streaming metrics, while guarded by the platforms’ notorious opacity, leak enough to be illuminating. Netflix’s own engagement report for the first half of 2023 placed Extraction 2 at 129 million hours viewed in its first month. That’s the second-highest original film launch for the platform that year. The centerpiece of that film—a 21-minute oner that moves from a prison riot to a moving train and a helicopter assault—was storyboarded months in advance and required Sam Hargrave, the director and former stuntman, to be flown on a wire while operating the camera. In a fractured attention economy, the sequence held viewers for a duration that terrifies algorithms. It suggests something counterintuitive: audiences want longer takes, not shorter ones, when the choreography is good enough.

There’s also the unlikely triumph of RRR. S.S. Rajamouli’s Telugu-language epic wasn’t a traditional Hollywood action movie by any market standard—it’s a three-hour historical fantasy bromance with musical numbers. But it became a cultural avalanche on Netflix, where the Hindi dub dominated the global top 10 for weeks, and a re-release in US theaters sustained sold-out screenings for months. The Naatu Naatu dance won an Oscar for Best Original Song. The action sequences—the prison break, the bridge rescue, the jungle animal stampede—are built from a philosophy Rajamouli has articulated in interviews: “If the audience can’t cheer, what’s the point?” He doesn’t care about realism. He cares about the physics of emotional release. That attitude infected a generation of action directors who’d been taught to apologize for fun.

The deeper churn: what this says about the industry

The best action films of this decade aren’t just good movies. They’re a corrective to 20 years of risk-averse, pre-visualized, franchise-first filmmaking. And the correction is uneven, inequitable, and fragile.

Start with who gets to be an action hero. The 2020s widened the frame. Dev Patel—skinny, wiry, from a drama background—didn’t just star in Monkey Man; he co-wrote, directed, and broke his hand during a fight scene and kept shooting. Michelle Yeoh, at 60, became the first Asian woman to win a Best Actress Oscar, for a role that required her to execute kung fu stunts she’d been perfecting since the 1980s. Charlize Theron returned as an immortal warrior in The Old Guard. Ke Huy Quan, a former child actor sidelined for decades, strapped on a fanny pack and fought his way back into relevance. Bob Odenkirk—a writer and character actor—became a credible action lead at 58 in Nobody, because director Ilya Naishuller and stunt coordinator Greg Rementer spent months training him to fight like someone who’d repressed violence his whole life.

But equity is still tangled. Asian and Asian-American-led action films still face distribution hurdles unless they arrive with Netflix backing or a Marvel logo. Female action leads are often confined to “empowerment” framing rather than allowed to be messy, ugly, or ambiguous. African action cinema remains nearly invisible in the global North. The global breakout of RRR is a triumph, but it’s also a reminder that a billion-dollar Indian film industry produces spectacular action yearly, and American audiences are only invited to notice once in a blue moon. The joy is real, but the invitation list is short.

For the people working in the trenches—stunt performers, coordinators, fight choreographers—the 2020s have brought unprecedented visibility and zero institutional recognition from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Oscars still do not have a category for stunt work. In February 2024, the Academy announced it would create a new award for casting directors starting with the 98th ceremony in 2026. That was a win for a long campaign, but the stunt community has been advocating for over 30 years. Directors like Leitch and Stahelski have made public appeals. The Stuntman’s Association published an open letter in early 2023 detailing how stunt performers design sequences that become iconic—and remain invisible. The visibility gap is dangerous, they argue, because without awards and union protections, performers remain underpaid and disposable. The number of on-set injuries in high-intensity action productions remains underreported. A 2022 Hollywood Reporter investigation found that safety protocols on action-heavy streaming films were often rushed, with fewer rehearsal days than comparable theatrical productions, driven by tighter turnaround schedules.

There’s also a tension brewing between practical spectacle and the economic realities facing mid-budget cinema. The films we celebrate—Nobody, $16 million budget; The Fall Guy, $130 million; Monkey Man, $10 million—are outliers in a system that has squeezed the middle of the market into near-extinction. Universal’s The Fall Guy, despite critical acclaim and a starry premiere at SXSW, opened below projections. The conversation quickly turned to “what audiences want vs. what they say they want.” If original, practical action can’t routinely open to $40 million domestic on a $130 million bet, studios will retreat into IP. The very films that define the decade’s best action are financial dice-rolls, and the next one could tip the wrong way.

The people in the seats

I talked to a projectionist in Dallas last year who’s worked at the same multiplex since 2001. He told me the only time he’s seen audiences stand up and scream since the original Avengers was during the final runway sequence of Top Gun: Maverick and the stairway fight in John Wick 4. Not at a digital sky beam. At the sound of real engines. At a man stumbling and then rising again.

There’s something at the core of this decade’s action cinema that resists cynicism. It’s the reason people post grainy theater-audio clips of the Osage Avenue shootout in No Time to Die—Daniel Craig’s final Bond outing, a film that married explosive practical set pieces with genuine emotional stakes. It’s the reason the 12-minute oner in Extraction gets shared as a standalone nearly as often as the movie itself. It’s why RRR screenings became dance parties, with audiences mirroring the leg kicks during Naatu Naatu.

These films answer a question users on Letterboxd and MovieTok ask constantly: “Why don’t movies feel real anymore?” They answer it by showing you Tyler Rake’s knuckles ripping open on a prison wall. By shooting Ana de Armas fighting an entire stairwell’s worth of assassins in No Time to Die in long, uncut blocks. By letting Dev Patel look exhausted, not invincible, during the climactic brawl in Monkey Man. The emotional response isn’t just “cool.” It’s relief. Relief that someone still cares enough to do it right.

For fans with physical disabilities or mobility limitations, there’s a deeper resonance. Action cinema is often about bodies and limits. When a film like Everything Everywhere treats its characters’ physicality with absurdity and tenderness, or when John Wick shows a protagonist who uses adaptative strategies to fight while injured, it speaks directly to people for whom bodily friction is daily life. The best action doesn’t pretend the body is unbreakable; it makes the breaking matter.

The biggest open question audiences carry now is one of sustainability. Can Keanu Reeves, at 60, keep doing this? Will Charlize Theron’s injuries from Atomic Blonde and The Old Guard push her out of the genre? What happens when the generation of stunt-trained actors and directors—many in their 40s and 50s—has to hand the reins to a younger group raised on YouTube parkour and TikTok edits? No one knows yet. The training infrastructure exists in the 87North gym and in independent dojos, but the industry’s economics don’t promise a steady pipeline of mid-budget action features to employ them.

What comes next on the action timeline

The next 12 to 18 months will test everything this renaissance has built. Mission: Impossible 8, subtitled The Final Reckoning, arrives in 2025 with the weight of Cruise’s entire legacy. The franchise has become a documentary of its own audacity—each entry showing the precise, real-world stunt that could have killed him. The image of Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff in Dead Reckoning Part One, repeated endlessly in the marketing, set a high bar. If the sequel delivers, it may be the last great practical blockbuster before the CG tide rises again.

Chad Stahelski has talked openly about developing a John Wick anime and a new Highlander reboot with Henry Cavill, but not another direct sequel. Instead, the Wick universe expands through Ballerina—the Ana de Armas spin-off set between the third and fourth films—and a prequel TV series The Continental that has already aired. The spin-offs will test whether the action philosophy can scale without Reeves at the center. Ballerina’s early screenings reportedly required reshoots to meet the franchise’s fight standard. That kind of institutional stubbornness is exactly what the genre needs.

On the international front, the success of RRR and the continued appetite for Korean action (the Alienoid films, the upcoming Bogota) suggest that subtitled action may finally break permanently into the Anglophone mainstream. Netflix’s investment in Indian action—the Hindi-language Animal was one of the most-streamed Indian films in 2024—signals a talent pipeline that could make the next global action icon someone working in Malayalam or Tamil, not English.

There’s also the slow, grinding battle for industry recognition. The push for an Academy Award for stunt coordination will continue. In the meantime, the Screen Actors Guild and the Stuntmen’s Association are pushing for tighter safety regulations on streaming sets. Insiders whisper about a potential class-action lawsuit over the working conditions on several unnamed action-heavy productions that ran during the 2021-2022 production boom. The practical action movement has an ethical shadow, and the next few years will determine whether the celebration of “real stunts” comes with a genuine commitment to the people who perform them.

If you’re a viewer, your role is simpler than you think. Watch these films in theaters when you can. Seek out international action on streaming. Pay attention to the stunt credits. Share the clips. The economic signal that audiences send—that practical action is worth a ticket price—is the single strongest force determining whether this run of films continues or curdles into the next nostalgia cycle. The movies are doing their part. They’re showing the work. They just need eyes.

That staircase in Paris. It took Vincent Bouillon, the stunt coordinator on the sequence, four months of rehearsal with the doubles team. The 222 steps are real—the Montmartre stairs are a tourist landmark. Keanu Reeves did many of the tumbles himself, but so did four other performers, each risking career-ending injury on every take. The shot that broke the internet was a collaborative act of physical storytelling that most viewers will never fully deconstruct. They just feel it in their knees. And that, right there, is the entire argument for what action cinema can be. Not a digital approximation of danger. Not a property-managed content delivery system. But a body, pushed too far, getting up again. We’re lucky to be watching.

FAQ

Q1: What is the best action movie of the 2020s so far?
There is no consensus pick, but John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022) are the films most frequently cited by critics and audiences for their seamless blend of practical stunt work, emotional stakes, and commercial success. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) also ranks among the most inventive action movies ever made and holds the rare distinction of winning Best Picture while featuring extended martial-arts sequences. The “best” depends on whether you prioritize raw fight choreography, aerial realism, or genre-bending creativity.

Q2: Are practical stunts really better than CGI in action movies?
Not inherently, but they create a different sense of presence. When audiences can unconsciously register that a car really flipped or a body really fell, the tension becomes physiological rather than intellectual. CGI is a powerful tool that shines when extending what is impossible—Everything Everywhere All at Once used digital effects extensively alongside practical fight work. The modern action sweet spot combines both, with practical stunts anchoring the danger and digital effects smoothing the impossible. The problem in the 2010s was over-relying on digital doubles, which often looked weightless and undercut the illusion.

Q3: Why are so many international action films breaking into the mainstream now?
Streaming platforms have lowered the barrier for non-English-language films to reach global audiences. RRR exploded on Netflix because its Hindi dub and flashy algorithm placement put it in front of tens of millions of viewers who would never have bought a ticket for a Telugu period epic. Simultaneously, a generation of American action fans raised on The Raid and Oldboy created grassroots demand on social media. The market followed the enthusiasm. Korean, Indian, and Indonesian action cinema now carries a cultural coolness that studios are beginning to monetize.

Q4: Will there be an Academy Award for stunt work?
Not yet, but the campaign has gained momentum. As of early 2025, no stunt Oscar category exists, though the Academy’s recent addition of a casting award shows the organization is willing to expand recognition. Directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch have been vocal advocates, and the Stuntmen’s Association continues to lobby. The primary obstacle is internal Academy resistance and a fear of encouraging more dangerous stunts. Many industry watchers predict a stunt Oscar could arrive within the next five to ten years if the current wave of stunt-driven films continues to dominate conversation.

Q5: What upcoming action movies should I watch for?
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) is the most anticipated, given Tom Cruise’s commitment to escalating practical stunts. Ana de Armas stars in the John Wick spin-off Ballerina (2025). Dev Patel has hinted at a Monkey Man follow-up. On the streaming side, Netflix has multiple action projects in development from Extraction director Sam Hargrave and the Indonesian action team behind The Night Comes for Us. The international pipeline remains rich—watch for S.S. Rajamouli’s next film and the continued rise of Korean action cinema.