There are lots of YouTube videos of this in action. Here’s one of many:
I always have to wonder whats going thru the mind of the 8th guy in line -
“maybe he’s tired, I can take him - I know I can - I’ll just ignore the 7 bodies lieng around me”
That ruined the end of The Shootist for me.
I know it doesn’t happen with movie heroes, but it’s actually less implausible in real-world fighting. It tires you out fast, and fighting 7 opponents one-on-one in a row is no joke, even if you take each of them out pretty quickly. Meanwhile, each of your opponents is fresh. Of course, the question mook #8 needs to ask is “Did mook #7 manage to tire him out that much more than the first six?”
The most people I have fought one-on-one in succession is ~35, I think (during a demo at a convention). Despite most of them being complete novices and the fact that I was using the most energy-conservative elements of my style, I discovered afterward that I literally could not lift a foot high enough to place it on a the first step of the stairs.
From a practical standpoint, it is extraordinarily difficult to choreograph a fight scene in which one person is fighting multiple opponents. I have some experience with fight choreography, and with just two people it’s an intricate ballet. Adding more people increases the difficulty exponentially.
The only example I’ve seen where this was done convincingly was in The Phantom Menace, and that was only three people. The scene from The Matrix Reloaded that was mentioned upthread was, I believe, primarily CGI.
Yes. Frankly, I think it’s harder to choreograph a multi-body fight than to just fight it. That looks like crap on film, though. There’s a reason for techie fencing suits; even experts have trouble telling what’s going on when people are fighting at speed.
It happened a lot in The Wild Wild West TV series. Simultaneously fighting three or four assailants was James West’s signature move.
… And the show was eventually cancelled for being too violent. 
I strongly disagree. I have always thought that fight was a particularly bad example of how easily the two attackers should have defeated the one. If you watch just Obi-Wan, or just Qui-Gon, you can see numerous chances where they could have pressed the attack and taken out Maul easily, but instead they decided to twirl their saber around or do a spin move so that Maul has a nice rhythm to his blocking. Two attackers with swords vs any 1 defender? The defender’s only hope is to disarm or defeat one of the attackers immediately or that fight is over.
2v1 isn’t that hard, if you have room to move. If you retreat, they can come at you side-by-side to both attack at the same time. As soon as you curve to the side, one attacker is in the way of the other. Each time they try to adjust, you curve the other way. You can create openings to attack #1 when #2 can’t reach you, and just disabling him so he can’t keep up is enough to turn it back into 1v1.
This is not necessarily the case. I agree that it would be the best tactic for the defender, but a dual-wielding defender can hold off two single-sword opponents for some time, especially if they have room to fall back. If facing opponents they expect to be well-coordinated or particularly skilled in defense, they might do so while looking for a perfectly clear shot at one or the other. (Some of the apparent openings might look like a trap to the defender.)
That’s not to say the main thrust of your post is off. The fight looked great, but the fancy spinny stuff is not real fight material. (That’s crap you do to show off, or at best, to loosen up.) Movie fights are generally not like real fights, but that’s because real fights are mostly not much fun to watch.
I could see a case in real life where all the attackers are afraid to attack, and no one wants to be the first to be killed. Think of you and your buddies taking on Bruce Lee.
I once saw a film of wolves attacking a moose, and it looked like that. There were a bunch of wolves (not a pack, certainly – they weren’t that organized) standing outside a shallow river, in which there was a moose. The wolves didn’t look like a ravening pack of carnivores. They looked like a bunch of suburban house dogs that had been rounded up and told that they could go home as soon as they took down the moose. Every now and then one would break free from the others, run out into the river, and nip at the Moose before said moose had a chance to kick the wolf to death, then run back to the bunch. Then, after a long wait, another wolf would do it. It was a pitiful sight. It might even have worked, eventually, but what you saw was the wolves attacking the moose in its full sight, one at a time, rather than the entire pack attacking at once, from all sides.
I can’t find it on YouTube, although there are plenty of other Moose vs. Wolves videos.
QFT. Many years ago, when I was young and did aikido, we sometimes did a thing in practice called randori, which was multiple people attacking a single target. If you were smart, you’d drop the nearest attacker in the path of the other two, forcing them to circle around to get at you. That gives you time to breathe and plan.
Smart henchpersons do this because it is in their best interests.
If all 20 of you go one at a time against Batman, you get a broken nose or a couple of cracked ribs, and when you are healed up you go back to work, along with the 20 more goons the Penguin hired to supplement the ranks. Everybody gets paid.
If all 20 of you bull rush him, take him down by sheer weight of numbers, and efficiently dispose of him… all of a sudden Oswald doesn’t need that many goons, and you still gotta make rent and feed the cat. You don’t want to put yourself in a position where you have to take a job washing dishes or cementing joints inside sewer pipes or working (however briefly) for the Joker.
It does happen in real life, particularly in status-centered monkey dance fights where the primate in question is working himself up to fight, and his hench-chimps haven’t fully decided if they’re going to attack or not.
This is by far the most likely type of violence, unless you’re the chosen victim of professional criminals or assassins, the latter of which happens to basically no one outside of a war zone or a movie 
As a defender, your problem is figuring out 1) Is this a dominance show or predatory attack? 2) Does he have compatriots? 3) If a dominance show, will the others come to his aid, or is attacking the leader (highest-status / most aggressive) the best way to end it quickly and discourage escalation?
My biggest problem with UFC / BJJ / MMA “take the fight to the ground” philosophy is that with multiple attackers, you are far more likely to end up in the middle of a dog-pile of pissed-off guys, or giving his buddies free kicks at your head, neck, spine, kidneys, etc. Rolling around on a bar floor is also likely to result in injuries from broken glass along with those other risks. Unless you’re absolutely certain you’re going to be able to take the guy down, break his arm, and get the fuck back up in a few seconds to engage other attackers, you SHOULD NOT go to the ground if at all possible.
Submissions are a Very Bad Idea™ when it comes to non-competitive fights. There’s no ref, and sometimes you don’t know whether it’s going to be a group fight or not until too late. A common refrain in ground fights where the aggressor’s buddies joined the party after seeing that the defender was gaining the upper hand / submission is, “I remember the first two or three kicks pretty clearly …”
With professional violence, yes, you probably will be swarmed, disarmed, and incapacitated pretty quickly. Small groups that have trained or practiced together will have routines that steamroll over even other groups because it’s very, very hard to regain initiative. If you have been attacked, you are reacting. Processing and launching an appropriate response is always much slower than pre-planned action.
But, and this is a big but, most groups haven’t trained together that much. Some types of soldiers, riot or correctional officers, and bodyguards are about the only groups that do. Criminals typically have routines that they’ve practiced with selected victims. They have a lot of practice running a script, but can be thrown off by “ad-libbing” if they fuck up and choose an inappropriate victim.
So, going back to the actual topic, movie violence: the situations shown are extremely unrealistic to begin with. You basically will never have a large group of people fighting together to attack a single defender or small group of defenders. If you do have a large group, and they’ve done any training at all, they’re probably going to work together in smaller units. Militaries have by and large reorganized with small groups (3–4 people) like fireteams because you can gain high level of cohesiveness and flexibility of response.
Groups that have not trained enough to work together effectively will get in each other’s way. You can use maneuvering and target choice to exploit this.
That fencing video linked above was actually a good illustration of two non-cohesive groups facing off. If the three ranking experts had had any experience working together, they could have torn through the greater numbers even faster, and would all probably have survived; they were beaten separately. On the other hand, if the 50 novices had worked on group tactics, the three might have fallen almost immediately. As to “taking turns”, notice that even when it’s just a balloon, no one wants to be the first to “die”, and they often had trouble not interfering with another attacker’s line.
Several of the waza in my old-style Japanese sword school have you attack a side or rear attacker, either after feinting at a facing attacker or as a response to an incoming attack from a different foe.
Randori (random attack drills) are often practiced even in sportified versions of martial arts like kendo and judo. Every old-style martial arts school I’ve trained with does work with multiple attackers, even more than the limited mainstream judo experience I’ve had. If your only exposure to aikido has been with the touchy-feely ki-centered stuff, you might not be aware that even aikido does randori practice.
No matter what their training, if you can start getting an emotional response, you can disrupt the responses of a team. Ancient and medieval war training focused greatly on maintaining formation and recovering formation because when there is too much disruption, people’s natural responses are to revert to reacting individually. If you scare them, surprise them, or manage to steal initiative, you can turn a team into a group of individuals, and then it’s down to just not fucking up, and not exhausting yourself.
This is one of my favorites.
In the opening scene of Fury Road, Max is trying to fight / escape a bunch of guys. Although he succeeds in beating a couple of them and extending the chase for a while, eventually he gets cornered and they all dogpile him and take him prisoner pretty easily.
I remember thinking at the time that it was going to be really unrealistic that he was going to defeat this huge mob, and then they managed to turn that expectation around.
In some prisons, they have specially trained teams of guards to extract particularly troublesome prisoners from their cells or from other places where they are holed up. The guards have assigned roles - “you go for the left arm, I go for the right, you are right leg, you are left leg, Joe goes behind him and grab around the neck.” It isn’t pretty like the movies, but very, very few prisoners can delay being extracted for more than a minute or two.
Nearly any plan is better than no plan. And a two- or three-to-one advantage is a big advantage. And I would pick any three college football lineman against the average street fighter, or even the above-average one. Because while you are taking out the first one, the other two tackle you and sit on you and beat the crap out of you.
The single defender against multiple assailants had better not wait to be attacked - he must take the initiative against the weakest attacker, or whoever is closest or is leading the attack. Take him out and get the hell out of there.
Regards,
Shodan
Also, an addendum - sometimes IRL one or two will attack first, because not everyone is equally committed to the fight. One guy wants to kick your ass, the others may want to help beat you up if it is merely a question of beating someone up but not nearly as interested in actually getting some skin in the game, where there might be something coming back at them.
Regards,
Shodan
I didn’t say it was realistic; movie fights rarely are. Obviously in a real-world, two vs. one scenario, the fight is probably going to be over very quickly.
What I meant was that the fight is staged and choreographed in a manner that feels plausible and doesn’t defeat suspension of disbelief, in contrast to the cliched fights described in the OP. I understand it didn’t work for you, but I’m seeing it as a “performance” and not as a realistic depiction of anything.
IIRC, one of the movie novelizations goes into some detail about various Jedi fighting styles, and a character pejoratively describes one style as showoffy, with unnecessary spins and so forth. I can’t remember which book that was, though.