You don’t have to be an actor to drive Hollywood’s most iconic whips
— but you better have deep pockets.
Two brothers from Florida are combining their love of cars with their passion for movies to build and sell custom vehicles typically only seen on the big screen.
“We’ve had clients like 50 Cent, Flo Rida, Lil Wayne and John Cena – and have done work for Universal Pictures,” Marc Parker told Barcroft Media. “Some of these cars can cost upwards of close to a million dollars depending on what it is.”
Working out their shop in Port Canaveral, Marc and Shanon Parker first began constructing their replicas four years ago. Today, their collection includes cars from some of the biggest blockbusters in movie history — such as a street-legal Batman Tumbler from “The Dark Knight” trilogy, a pristine Ecto-1 ambulance from “Ghostbusters,” as well as a (non-transforming) Optimus Prime from “Transformers.”
“We didn’t have the money to pay people to customize vehicles for us, and what we needed didn’t exist, so we had to learn to build our parts,” Marc explained. “Every part of the Tumbler was made from scratch in our shop – the frame, chassis, wheels, glass, everything.”
Shanon, 44, is the brains behind the design at Parker Brothers Concepts, and Marc, 45, is in charge of taking his brother’s drawings and bringing them to life in shop.
“Shanon thinks if he can draw it, I can build it – but it’s more difficult than that,” Marc told Barcroft. “He knows very little about mechanics, so he’s not limited like a lot of designers who have engineering degrees – there’s nothing holding him back when it comes to design.”
And at the end of the day, what matters most to the Parker brothers, is that their custom rides are always turning heads.
“We get a lot of reactions in the street – a lot of times people will come up next to us and box us in, wanting to take pictures,” Shanon said. “If you’re doing something that’s causing that kind of reaction you know you’re doing something right.”