“Damn, this is heavy.” - Samuel L. Jackson as Zeus Carver

He said it well. Gold is a dense element. Its immense value per gram makes it the perfect stuff to jam into a vault. In a few rooms, you can store the revenue of a nation. Try doing that with pictures of Ben Franklin; you’ll find you need a warehouse.

Much to the joy of Hollywood, there really are vaults gleaming with bricks of the stuff. But, could you really rob one the way that it’s done in Die Hard 3?

No.

The value of the gold in the film is $140 billion. This is how much Simon claims to be stealing, though a few bars got left behind at the vault excavation. We can assume that Simon’s men were able to load almost all of the gold into their 14 dump trucks, because Simon says the dump truck John McClane hijacks contains $13 billion worth of gold.

Actually, dividing $140 billion over 14 trucks, an estimate of $10 billion per truck would be sensible. So either Simon knows that one has a little extra (it was the last one after all) or he’s just inflating the number to try and get McClane to take the bribe.

By weight, even $10 billion in gold couldn’t fit in one truck.

The dump truck McClane steals is a Mack R685ST. The 6 in that name refers to the chassis rating, indicating it’s built to support 6,000 pounds of weight. The movie was released in 1995, and during that year, gold was valued at around $385 USD per troy ounce, or approximately $5,616 per pound.

That means that by weight, the truck in the film could hold about $33.7 million in 1995 gold. And $10 billion would require almost 300 dump trucks (like the one in the film) to transport.

The total $140 billion in 1995 gold would load nearly 4,150 trucks as used in the film… a far cry from the 14 used in shooting.

By volume?

Of course, maybe the director (John McTiernan, who also helmed the technically inept Hunt for Red October) was thinking of volume. You know, if somehow you were able to fill a dump truck to the brim with gold bars, and weight was not the limiting issue.

I can’t be certain of all the dump trucks used in the film, but for this example, let’s assume the cargo area of the trucks was a generous 16’ long, 8’ wide and 5’ tall. Let’s also assume that all the gold bricks were perfectly stacked, and came in 1 kilo bars of 80 mm long, 40 mm wide and 18 mm thick.

This gets you close. I calculate that if this entire space was filled with 1995 gold, it would be valued at $8.76 billion.

At that rate, a few extra dollars an ounce would get you to the $140 billion mark. Perhaps Simon was expecting a mild price jump given the tremendous heist and supposed detonation of the gold.

Of course, using volume measurements is downright crazy. Since the film didn’t take place in outer space, we can’t push our disbelief so far as to ignore the force of gravity entirely.

Suspension (of disbelief)

It’s the movies, so it seems like we should hold out tongues and feign acceptance. $140 billion in 14 dump trucks? Sure why not. That’s what we told ourselves before we started doing the math. With a disparity this great, it’s interesting to see the numbers.

Possibly remedy

The film makers could have doubled the number of trucks, and gotten away with saying they contained $1 billion. Of course, that wouldn’t be enough money to wreck the national economy. Then again, with the way we throw money at the middle east, perhaps $140 billion wouldn’t cripple us either.

The alternative—filming 4,150 loaded dump trucks escape from Manhattan on a weekday afternoon—would raise even more eyebrows among the city’s millions of commuters.

Next time, I hope he turgs the sucker. Today, John McTiernan has recognized the mistakes concerning the weight of gold. Of course, being 300 times off the mark, is bad even by Bruckheimer standards.

For more on Hollywood’s magical power over weight and volume, read Cockeyed.com’s “How Much is Inside a Million Dollars.”

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Tags: Die Hard, John McClane