‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’ Has The Most On-Screen Deaths Of Any Movie Ever

Since violence is so prevalent in today’s movies, you might be surprised to learn that at one time, violence wasn’t so rampant. There was even a time when a movie like the originalScarfacefrom 1932, directed by Howard Hawks and produced by Howard Hughes, was almost withheld from release because of the presence of violence. By today’s standards, the movie is remarkably tame, but at the time, it was almost offensive.

If you need anymore evidence of the rise of casual violence in movies, look no further than a recently complied list of movies with the most on-screen deaths. You might be surprised to learn thatGuardians of the Galaxyhas the record formost on-screen deaths, and it’s actually way ahead of the closest competition. Check out the data on the most deaths in movies after the jump.

Most Deaths in Movies

Here’s the list of the top 10 movies with the most on-screen deaths fromGo Compare:

The high kill count forGuardians of the Galaxycomes mostly from the 80,000 Nova Corp pilots who are killed when all of their ships are destroyed by Ronan The Accuser’s ship the Dark Aster. They form a makeshift shield to stop the ship from colliding with Xandar, but it ends up breaking and all the ships are destroyed.

As you can see, the second most on-screen deaths come fromDracula Untoldat 5,687, which is 78,184 deaths away fromGuardians of the Galaxy. You can see how all the other movies compare beyond the top 10 with a roster of653 movies tabulated for this data collection. To make it slightly easier, they only included movies with a kill count higher than 50.

My question is how they determined what constitutes an on-screen death, because surely there had to be more than 182 people killed inStar Wars: A New Hope. Wouldn’t everyone killed in the Death Star and Alderaan explosions be considered an on-screen death? Sure, it’s hard to determine just how many people were in those places at the time, but then again, how do they know the number of Nova Corp pilots killed? I’m not sure this adds up, but it’s some interesting data to see nonetheless.