With Avengers: Endgame nearly here, more than a decade of storytelling will culminate in the highly anticipated 22nd entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Since 2007, the Marvel superheroes have saved the world from aliens, robots, and a primordial world-consuming entity, to name a few. But those explosive and escalating encounters leave behind injuries, bodies, and crumbling buildings. What’s the compounding economic toll to countries in a world full of super-powered beings?
Frances Kelleher ’19 sought an answer, and the investigation became the economics major’s senior project. After intensive re-watches of the films and copious notes on every punch and explosion, she was able to quantify the impacts of super-villains and heroes on their fictional economies in terms of real-world numbers.
“There is value in analyzing fiction,” Kelleher said, who added that it’s possible to learn about the real world by looking at fictional ones.
Her scope included most of the Marvel movies, minus the films set in space: both Guardians of the Galaxy movies and Thor: Ragnorak. Infinity War wasn’t factored in, either; there’s no metric for half of all life in the universe turning to dust. For a measurement tool, she turned to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI), which provides formulas for weighing the toll of deaths, injuries, and property damage to a country’s economy. Since constant attacks have lasting, reverberating effects, the index factors in incidents from the prior four years, as well, giving less weight to events as they fade into the past.
She concluded that Avengers: Age of Ultron, which culminates with an evacuated city falling from the sky, had the greatest impact of any one Marvel movie—by far—with a raw GTI score of 677.5, due to 208 deaths, 67 injuries, and $474 billion in property damage. When judging the impact of each superhero individually, she also found Iron Man was typically connected to the most damage. And when the index factors in the compounding effects of constant destructive incidents, the toll on Marvel’s world becomes apparent, as the calculated impact grows nearly every year.
“I found that compared to the real world, looking at every year, it didn’t seem like it was that big of a difference between the economic effect of terrorism in the real world and the effect of superheroes and supervillains fighting in the Marvel universe,” Kelleher said. “I definitely thought the MCU was going to be higher. There’s so much damage in all of them.”
As Kelleher watched alien invaders wreck Midtown Manhattan’s skyscrapers, and an out-of-control Hulk tear up Johannesburg, she interpreted the details the way a literary scholar would analyze a text. Without even being aware of the benefit in the moment, Kelleher was drawing on her English courses to engage the text of the MCU and transform its narratives into the kind of data that her economics training could use. In the midst of world-threatening crises and larger-than-life heroics, she bridged the humanities and social sciences—and demonstrated the inclusive breadth of economics.
“Many people incorrectly view economics as being closely- and narrowly-aligned with the business world,” said economics professor Roger White. It’s certainly connected to fields like finance and international business, but White points out that economics is “a broad discipline that connects to mathematics, political science, psychology, history, and more.”
A crucial scene in Captain America: Civil War gave Kelleher real numbers to help her interpret the destruction from the other movies. At the Avengers headquarters, General Ross levels with the team: world powers are so shaken by the growing collateral damage that the United Nations is demanding greater accountability. Behind Ross, a computer screen loops scenes of devastation in New York, Nigeria, and Sokovia, among others.
That moment unlocked the project for Kelleher. On the screens, she noticed they included death tolls and dollar figures for several of the major conflicts, which gave her the baseline she needed to analyze the rest of the movies.
The experience has changed the way Kelleher watches the movies she’s passionate about.
“It’s completely different going back to look at them knowing that I’ve gone through them and I can imagine what the damage is in the real world,” she said. “I think they do a good job of carrying that over in the movies, especially with Spider-Man: Homecoming, which is all about the aftermath of the first Avengers movie. Knowing that, and going in and looking in depth at them, puts them all in a new light.”
Her study brings hard data to a larger cultural conversation about the treatment of death and destruction in the world’s most popular film genre. The devastation in movies like Man of Steel, Avengers, and the X-Men franchise prompts dialogues about the genre as a prism through which storytellers and audiences process real-world tragedies and conflicts, our responses to those events, and what responsibilities filmmakers have in telling those stories.
Applying real-world metrics to movies like the MCU can help guide studios craft more realistic narratives. Even the act of exploring the economic impact question provides the opportunity to imagine what-if scenarios and solutions.
“As a reflection of the real world, the MCU offers a look at the effects of attacks similar to natural disasters or terrorist attacks,” Kelleher said. “Forming solutions for the problems of superheroes can help to answer questions we have about problems in reality. It may not find an exact solution, but allows for an exploration of different solutions."
