Try the movie Knowing (2009).
I think “World War Z” may be up there. Not only does most of the world’s population die, but they also die twice!
There weren’t really eighty-eight of them. They just called themselves “The Crazy 88” because they thought the name sounded cool.
To be sure you’d have to have somebody in the teahouse who is good at counting. Perhaps the 5.6.7.8’s?
Were the people scooped up in Soylent Green all doomed?
On the one hand, it sure seemed that way. But on the other hand that fact that SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE wasn’t know yet. So, maybe just taken off to work camps?
It doesn’t matter - the world is doomed. The oceans are dead. And Soylent Green is not sustainable.
The original Star Wars probably deserves a mention. They showed the Death Star blowing up the entire planet Alderaan, which according to a fansite had a population of two billion. That’s probably the most deaths ever depicted on screen.
I couldn’t open the link to the counting methodology, but it seems to me that “body count” is a bit tough to calculate.
Fore example for Titanic they obviously don’t count all 1500+ people who went down with the ship.
Do they count every extra, mannequin, or CGI character playing a floating corpse in the background?
Is it just where we see a character’s on-screen death?
Too many variables really for a definitive answer. Any film with explosions will assume bodies that we never see and may not even be referred to. The Titanic had a known death count, but the vast majority were not featured in the film.
The film that triggered my query, doesn’t even feature in the list above. Maybe the list should be restricted to counting deaths of named characters only.
If I remember right, The World, The Flesh and The Devil got Earth depopulated down to 3 people.
The Stand also had a rather high body count.
And let’s not forget Monty Python.
I would assume apocalypse movies would head the body count list. Greenland, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, etc. Then there’s other types like alien invasion and pandemics, like A Quite Place, I Am Legend, World War Z. Of course, these are mostly off screen, so I don’t know that that counts.
Then I’ll nominate “The Wild Bunch.” The list of surviving named characters is what, 3? Both “good” and bad guys. None of them the title characters.
Then percentage-wise Seven Samurai would beat that because there were three survivors out of the seven plus forty bandits (Mostly mooks) plus an unknown number of villagers, perhaps a dozen or two.
Oh, yeah, two more during the recruiting part, the bandit who kidnapped a baby Shimada kills by disguising himself as a priest and the braggart Kyūzō opens up.
I feel you have to restrict the body counts to deaths that are shown on screen. Otherwise, you can argue that a movie like Dumbo has a massive body count. Sure, the audience didn’t see anybody die in that movie. But the movie was set in 1941 so millions of people were being killed in other parts of the world while the events of the movie were being shown.
Yeah, I thought about that. Then I wondered if something like Star Wars: A New Hope might take the crown. We see a planet of billions and a space station of millions explode on screen. Deaths are “felt”. Then again, you could argue Star Wars was a war movie, so…
The deaths have to be on screen and actively caused by a character. (Alderaan and the Death Star would count, but is it a “war movie”?) The characters do not have to have known names, All the unnamed soldiers killed by Matrix during Commando? They count. All of the 7 billion people zombified in the two Zombieland films? Don’t count. Only the ones specifically kiiled on screen by the characters should count.
Technically speaking, in 1951’s Five, half of the enitre human race, all named, dies onscreen.
(By the start of the film, the human race has been reduced to six people.)
The adaption of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. Not only do most humans die, but almost all life on Earth, animal and plant.
Unless you argue that the event that caused the catastrophe was a nuclear war, but I always assumed a giant meteorite or asteroid strike.
ETA:
Just noticed this, but since it wasn’t stipulated by the OP, I’ll let my answer stand.
It was only my definition. It’s non-binding.
According to Deadline (how appropriate) the original Guardians of the Galaxy is on the run for the title. (Although there are starships attacking cities), there is no declared war.)
Why so many? According to GoCompare, which compiled the report based on an examination of 653 films that had more than 50 on-screen deaths, the reason for the high number is because of the dramatic finale, which sees more than 80,000 Nova Corps pilots die in one scene. It’s comic book violence, to be sure, as opposed to gruesome, bloody deaths in other films.
The methodology to arrive at this? First of all, films with death counts below 50 were excluded. A “kill” was counted when either a dead body was seen or a character was very heavily implied dead. “Implied” means being shot or stabbed severely, mentioned as killed (and never returning), blown up, thrown off a cliff or shot/stabbed just off-screen and never heard from again. “Blown up” means lit on fire, blown to bits, last seen in an incinerated building/object or thrown off their feet by an explosion, causing them to not get back up (death by concussion). Animals and robots were only counted where they were played (either physically or voiced) by a human. Check out the full report here.
In second place in the grisly Top 10 list was Gary Shore’s Dracula Untold (2014), followed by The Sum of All Fears (2002) from director Phil Alden Robinson. The rest in order of most kills: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King , 300: Rise of an Empire , The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers , The Matrix Revolutions , The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies , Braveheart and The Avengers .