Fifty-five years ago, The French Connection didn’t just include a great chase. It laid the foundation for what the perfect movie car chase looks like. William Friedkin’s crime thriller, and later 1968’s Bullitt, nailed the blueprint: riveting, elaborate action set pieces that audiences remember and filmmakers try to copy. That long-running template is the reason most attempts to recreate that “magic” ended up feeling like imitation instead of impact.

Collider’s point is that Paul Thomas Anderson managed to do something rarer than copying a template. In just 4 minutes, his decade-spanning work delivers a modern cinematic car chase that’s described as the greatest, surpassing Bullitt and The French Connection. The bold part is not the chase itself. It is the way Anderson compresses the feeling of an entire escalation arc into a tiny window, turning a sequence into an event you can’t look away from.

To understand why this matters beyond film Twitter, you have to zoom out to how audiences, studios, and filmmakers evaluate action. Car chases are enduring for a reason: they are easy to market, visceral to watch, and they deliver clear stakes without needing a complicated explanation of plot mechanics. But the industry also knows that “more action” is not a strategy. The source makes the key historical distinction bluntly: Friedkin and Bullitt nailed the genre so well that anyone trying to re-create their magic was foolish.

So what does a “replacement” look like? Collider points to innovation that does not merely add novelty, but changes the viewer’s expectation of pacing and structure. In the same genre conversation, the source name-checks Mad Max: Fury Road as a movie that is practically one long car chase. That’s an extreme example of form following audience appetite, where the film’s momentum is built on continuous motion rather than stitched together set pieces. Anderson’s 4-minute feat fits the same underlying logic, just with a different packaging choice: instead of expanding the duration of a chase, it intensifies the density of the experience.

There is also a practical, second-order implication here for decision-makers. When a sequence becomes the new benchmark, it shifts the bar for what “epic” should accomplish. Executives and creative leaders who sign off on big action budgets often worry about diminishing returns. You can spend more money on bigger stunts, but if the audience’s benchmark moves to something tighter, smarter, and more rewatchable, the extra spend does not automatically translate into more attention. In other words, Anderson’s achievement as presented by Collider is a reminder that creative execution can outperform scale.

Regulatory framing and compliance may sound worlds apart from car chases, but the underlying pressures are real in modern production environments. Action sequences are where safety protocols, permitting, stunt coordination, and operational risk management converge. When a film is praised for doing something technically demanding in a short runtime, it can also imply more concentrated orchestration: fewer minutes where things can go wrong, but also fewer minutes to manage crowd flow, street work, and the logistical complexity that comes with large-scale motion in controlled environments. That is not a claim about Anderson’s process in the source, but it is the broader production reality that typically sits behind the on-screen results.

For boards, producers, and investors, the takeaway is not “make shorter chases.” It is that audience standards can reset around craft, pacing, and payoff. Collider anchors this reset by positioning Anderson’s 4 minutes as surpassing the long-standing reference points of Bullitt and The French Connection. Once that happens, the market conversation can shift quickly. Creators chasing legitimacy may feel pressure to hit the new baseline, and studios may reassess which kinds of action set pieces are worth the risk, time, and capital.

And that is why the story is more than a cinephile debate. A decade’s greatest movie car chase redefines what epic means in a way that can cascade into development decisions. If the bar moves from “a good chase” to “the chase that functions like a complete narrative engine,” then executives who fund action thrillers need to care about how scenes build momentum, not just how loud they are. Anderson’s 4-minute moment, as framed here, is a benchmark change, and benchmark changes create both winners and rewrites across slate planning.