Can Marvel's 'Civil War' Death Statistics Change Hollywood Disaster Porn?

The debut of Spider-Man and the kick-ass brawling between the Marvel superheroes in the last Captain America: Civil War trailer took up enough attention that everyone seemed to miss the film’s other massive reveal: the definite, canonical number of civilian fatalities throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

For so long, Hollywood movies even outside the superhero genre have used mass destruction to raise the stakes for its bigger than life protagonists, but have avoided the details. Though buildings blew up on celluloid before 9/11, after that day (along with improving SFX technology) our appetite for destruction has reached pornographic intensity. But what allows us to revel in the spectacle guilt free, besides the happy endings drenched in magic-hour sunsets, is that we never know the damage beyond the rubble. The movies keep us ignorant on the true fallout, letting us in on the primal thrill without the consequences.

But now, there’s Civil War, a superhero all about consequences. Releasing on May 6, Civil War adapts the 2006 Marvel comic of the same name where superheroes battle over their ambiguous ethical standing following another major disaster. In a reversal of the aforementioned indulgences, Civil War will rudely awakens audiences with confirmed death tolls in some of the last MCU movies.

During the trailer, look to the side of some of the film’s retrace of past MCU installments. You’ll see some revealing numbers. In The Avengers, 74 died in what is known in the MCU as the Battle of New York.

In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, only (comparatively speaking) 23 were killed.

In Avengers: Age of Ultron, 177 were claimed, which is pretty low considering it was an entire city lifted and dropped to Earth.

For comparison’s sake, the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 claimed 2,753 total.

It should be clear that these are just movies. 177 people didn’t actually die in Age of Ultron. But does this knowledge enrich or hinder the immersive experience of blockbuster superhero movies? And could these in-continuity statistics be used responsibly?

Perhaps, if only to save the superhero genre. 2013’s Man of Steel is widely criticized for embodying the worst of modern superhero movies, particularly with its absolute annihilation of Metropolis, which was so out of place; this is a movie meant to introduce Superman, and here Metropolis suffers the equivalent of a few atom bombs. Even for superheroes, it’s absurd.

Regularly attributed to Joseph Stalin and remembered by Call of Duty 2 gamers is the old saw: one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. In writing for Huffington Post, Erwann Michel-Kerjan and Paul Slovic explored the concept of the “collapse of compassion,” where our empathy and sympathy wear out as the numbers get higher.

“[T]he problem is that action on our part depends upon feelings of compassion that may be hard to arouse and sustain over time, for large numbers of victims,” they write. “We cannot ‘feel the meaning’ associated with threats to 20 million people.”

Is this why Hollywood feels so irresponsible in evocative 9/11 imagery? Man of Steel, once again, brushes past the total destruction of Metropolis in the end as if Zod didn’t turn it into a wasteland, and it’s only now with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is the DC universe finally addressing it. Other movies, particularly of the franchise flavor like Star Trek Into Darkness destroying San Francisco, Godzilla leveling Hawaii and Las Vegas, or the Marvel movies pretty much everywhere (until of course, Civil War) also reveled in destruction.

But now, Marvel is doing something: Citing statistics. It’s a grounded but unimportant side detail that is only serving to motivate the plot for Civil War, and however accidental or intentional it isn’t lost on me that Marvel’s alien invasions claim lower death tolls than real acts of terrorism. But 74 dead civilians in The Avengers. 74 anonymous, fictional characters. Is that too much? Or is it too little?