It's one of those classic debates that keeps popping up over and over: who truly is the greatest action hero of all time? Is it Stallone, who played John Rambo in one of the most famous action franchises of all time? Or perhaps Bruce Willis, for his turn as John McClane in Die Hard. Maybe someone more out there like Nicolas Cage or Daniel Craig? Well, according to BetVictor.com, there are objective ways to measure this sort of thing, and they came up with one actor who bests them all.
According to the betting website, their team cooked up an algorithm that factors in quite a few different variables in order to deduce the top action hero. Taking into account the 5 biggest action films from 10 of the biggest action heroes on the planet, they crunched the numbers in order to see who came up on top based on all the different achievements they had across their various films.
The formula took into account various numbers like punches thrown, villains defeated, and times they cheated death, and then also included various weighted scores like box office gross, overall review scores, and catchphrases used. For those interested in the numbers, their website includes a table of the data, and a peak at the chart is included below.
As the table clearly shows, Arnold Schwarzenegger came out on top when the dust settled, taking the spot of the top action hero. All the factors are considered, of course, but Schwarzenegger easily came out on top for number of hits received and weapons used, and also grabbed the top number of bad guys defeated as well as times he cheated death.
It's all still subjective of course, and there are some popular action stars that weren't taken into account, so this is by no means a definitive answer to the ultimate action hero question. That said, it's an interesting way to find a more quantitative way of crowning the greatest action heroes of all time.
Time continues pushing forward of course, and a few of the actors on the list still have active careers as well, meaning that things could still change even using this same formula. It will be interesting to see what new action heroes stake their claim in the public consciousness as Hollywood continues producing more and more extravagant action films.
Source: BetVictor