I watched a re-run of a Die Hard movie last night, and knowing the plot, decided to count the bodies. I gave up after a few minutes.
War films will have the biggest fatality rate, but some films, like the Die Hard series, seem pretty excessive in this respect.
Is there a website anywhere with the statistics?
Non-war films? Well, there’s The Andromeda Strain, and there are other sci-fi films about the last surviving human or even about Earth and all its inhabitants being destroyed (taking place in a distant future with a presumably higher world population).
If that’s not what you’re looking for, IMDB says it’s The Expendables 2, with 336 dead.
Commando? It helps if you have magical ammo that never runs out.
Counting dead bodies in trashy films? Sound like a job for Joe Bob Briggs!
ETA:
His original print columns were fantastic.
Deep Impact did a pretty good job of failing to save humanity where Armageddon succeeded, according to President Morgan Freeman.
The waters reached as far inland as the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys. It washed away farms and towns, forests and skyscrapers. But, the water receded. The wave hit Europe and Africa too. Millions were lost, and countless more left homeless.
I assume we want to measure individual people who die on screen because, yeah, otherwise planetary disaster movies are going to win in somewhat statistically indeterminate ways.
I would agree - people actively or passively killed by the hero and villain, be they good guys, bad guys or “collateral damage”.
Hot Shots! Part Deux rang up a huge body count, and they showed the total on screen. Technically, that wasn’t a war film.
The Wild Bunch ended with a glorious shootout, simply glorious!
Huh?
Assuming everyone is in town and no non-residents;
Piedmont, Arizona, population forty-eight
-two survivors
+one reconnaissance pilot
= 47 total deaths.
Probably an example for “In every thread about xxxx, someone always posts yyyy,” The Bible (1966): Richard Harris as Cain kills 25% of the human population.
Oh, does it all take place in a small town? I haven’t seen it since watching the first TV broadcast of the 1971 version and thought there was a much higher bodycount.
Yup, and if the town doctor hadn’t opened it outside of proper containment (the Project Scoop satellite was certainly designed to capture and safely contain samples) no one would have died at all!
For individual depictions of death, there is a single scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1 where there are close to 88 fatalities.
Deaths just from John Wick (not other kills in the movies):
77 - John Wick
128 - John Wick Chapter 2
94 - John Wick 3: Parabellum
And Thanos kills 50% of all life in the universe*. Seems excessive.
They got better…
I found one. Movie Body Counts: Charts: Highest Body Count Movies
I know it has War in the title, but does Avengers: Infinity War count? It’s not explicitly a war movie. I’d say 50% of the universe is a pretty high body count.
There’s movies where all of reality disappears, shouldn’t that have a higher body count?
Virus(1980)-Discounting movies when everyone on the planet kicks the bucket, I would go with this Japanese/American co-production. Everyone on Earth bites the big one except for a tiny colony in Antarctica.
Virus (1980 film) - Wikipedia
The first film I saw where I really thought about collateral damage was Blue Thunder (1983) where the climax was a dogfight in downtown LA between a super-duper helicopter and (I think) two jets, where the jets were firing rockets at the copter which would, of course, miss the target and blow up several floors of a tall building, over and over again. Maybe they were all office buildings but I couldn’t really tell, and so all I could think about was the poor innocent citizens being blown to bits for no good reason. I doubt if there is any way to count the bodies in a situation like that, so that film would not be high on the casualties list. But it stuck with me.
I like 2012 for a non-magic-based movie where all of the people on the planet are killed except for the ones that manage to make it onto those arks – so say 7 billion or so. And I love the ending, where the continent that suffered the least damage and so would then be colonized by these survivors, was – Africa. Was there some meaning to that? The cradle of humanity a second time? I was never sure.