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How Much Damage Did the Avengers Do to Manhattan?
Walt Disney Pictures
You can't have a modern superhero blockbuster without completely leveling one of the world's biggest cities -- that's the rule. But action movies are like sitcoms -- by the time the next episode arrives, everything is fine again. You don't hear about how much it costs to clean up all that shit, otherwise the next four Man of Steel movies would be about the decade-long effort to rebuild Metropolis.
Warner Bros. Pictures
Instead of the decade-long effort to rebuild a ravaged movie franchise.
Well, Kinetic Analysis Corp., a group specializing in figuring out how much disasters cost, got bored enough to do a detailed analysis of how much damage was done during the finale of The Avengers. Let's just say that it's going to take a while for the New York economy to recover. Using complex computer simulations and fancy math with, like, letters instead of numbers (so you know that it's hardcore), a team lead by Chuck Watson and Sara Jupin put the Avengers' damage at a mind-boggling $160 billion, making it the most costly disaster in human history. That includes 9/11, Katrina, and the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan (the last one costing "only" $122 billion in damages).
The KAC team estimated that the total physical damage from all of those smashed-up skyscrapers and the ruined infrastructure would equal $60 to $70 billion. The cleanup costs take that number up to $90 billion (watch the finale again, and think about how many truckloads of rubble and broken glass would need to be hauled out of the city over the next several months). Throw in the medical costs of the thousands of casualties, and you reach the grand total of $160 billion -- CGI is good at rendering a crumbling skyscraper, but not at conveying how many hundreds of survivors now have lifelong disabilities and seven-figure medical bills.
Walt Disney Pictures
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