There are few things that modern movies love more than guns. They’re everywhere, and that’s largely true whether you’re watching an action movie or an Oscar-baity drama. A gun ramps up the tension of basically any genre, so it’s no wonder that they’ve become a fixture of our big-screen entertainment.
The proliferation of guns in big movies has naturally led some to wonder what specific guns are used in which movies. Sometimes, in movies like John Wick, a lot of emphasis is placed on precisely which weapons are being used by the movie’s many assassins. In other movies, though, you don’t get as much attention to detail about exactly which weapons the main characters are using to shoot one another.
Thankfully, there’s a helpful resource that shows you which firearms are being handled in every movie you can think of that features a gun. The Internet Movie Firearms Database is a repository of posts that focuses on the handguns that central characters use in a wide variety of popular movies.
If, for example, you want details on all of the guns used in Fight Club, this site has a breakdown of every firearm used in the film, and that breakdown is accompanied by helpful pictures of the scenes when each weapon is used. The site, which is set up in a Wikipedia-style template, is fairly encyclopedic, and that knowledge extends past movies and into other art forms like TV shows and video games.
Of course, the site is limited to weapons that actually exist in the real world. If you look for the guns used in something like Alien, you’ll see that while there’s a page on the film, the information about the firearms being used is much more general. It describes the flamethrower used in the film, for example, but because the film is set in the future, it doesn’t offer specifics on the brand, etc.
Because the site is so comprehensive, it can be difficult to know where to start when looking through all of the thousands of titles that have been assembled. Fortunately, the site does allow you to organize its entry not just by the title of the movie, but also by the type of weapon used in it, and by the actors who star in the project.
The site also has a discussion tab and a separate discord where regular users can communicate with one another. Like Wikipedia, the Internet Movie Firearms Database seems to be built out in large part with help from individual users who watch movies and track which weapons are being used in each scene. The result is a site for those that are curious about weaponry, or are already experienced lovers of both movies and guns and are looking for an outlet. While the site is pretty comprehensive, you may also notice some missing movies on there that you can add yourself. Thankfully, the site’s interface gives you the power to do just that, as long as you know your gun facts. To start making edits yourself, all you need to do is request an account.
