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Rambo Inflation
Number of people killed per minute in the Rambo series.
- Rambo: First Blood (1982): 0.01
- Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985): 0.72
- Rambo III (1988): 1.30
- Rambo IV (2008): 2.59
Hat tip to Peter Gordon.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on January 22, 2008 at 07:28 AM in The Arts | Permalink
Comments
It's the learning curve.
Posted by: Jason at Jan 22, 2008 7:36:01 AM
Go back and watch "Last Action Hero." One of the best lines was about how in a sequel, the explosions have to be bigger.
Posted by: superdestroyer at Jan 22, 2008 8:01:38 AM
Interestingly teh rate of increase of the
metric has slowed down. Marginal beneift<
Marginal cost
Posted by: sa at Jan 22, 2008 8:44:09 AM
Other than the jump from the first to the second (a 72-fold increase), the rate is accelerating... maybe the first movie is just a statistical outlier.
Posted by: Michael Fisk at Jan 22, 2008 8:53:14 AM
Given that the first movie's original title was just "First Blood", and the second's was "Rambo: First Blood Part II", the third movie should have been called "Rambo II: First Blood Part III".
Posted by: noahpoah at Jan 22, 2008 9:02:31 AM
I made a chart.
Feel free to pas it around, commenters.
Posted by: Trevor at Jan 22, 2008 9:22:59 AM
I have to take issue with the first stat - one of the points of the first Rambo movie is that you don't need to make an action movie with any death. Hence, not a single person dies on screen. How did they get that number?
Posted by: John at Jan 22, 2008 9:33:29 AM
The one death in First Blood is really an accidental death rather than a killing, when the guy falls from the helicopter.
Posted by: at Jan 22, 2008 10:53:37 AM
John, the author says the first killing is at 29:31 if you want to check it out! :)
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Jan 22, 2008 11:03:53 AM
Actually, the rate is decreasing. Michael Fisk makes the mistake of throwing out and outlier when we only have three data points. Trevor neglects the twenty-year period between the third and fourth movies.
A second-order polynomial gives
dpm = -0.077x^2 + 0.3691x - 2.1971 where x = YADR2K (Years after Death Race 2000).
Posted by: Steve R at Jan 22, 2008 11:05:45 AM
I was wondering about that, seeing the commercials for the new movie. I never saw "First Blood" all the way through, but I figure it's one of those late-70's, early-80's cult movies like "Halloween" and "Assault on Precinct 13" that are, seen now, more impressive for their economy and suspense than for sheer mayhem. Nothing - except probably Cecil B. DeMille pix, which I also haven't seen - comes close to the mid- to late-80's for excessive excess.
Posted by: HJA at Jan 22, 2008 11:11:40 AM
This seems to be a pattern with Stallone movies - take the element that made the original unique, and then go successively further and further away from that with each sequel.
First Blood wasn't a true action flick, but its sequels become increasingly mindless shoot-em-ups.
In the original Rocky, he's an ordinary schmoe who never stood a chance against the champ, but managed to keep his pride by going the distance even as he's beaten into a pulp. In Rocky II, he beats the champ due mostly to the champ's hubris; it's a victory, but it's also clear that he was lucky to pull it off. Rocky III, Apollo manages to turn him into a real fighter and beats a challenger using talent and guile he never had before. He's retired in Rocky IV, yet somehow he manages to become even better than ever in order to avenge his friend. I didn't see either version of Rocky V, but I think the latest one has him coming out of retirement to fight the current champ at his prime.
Posted by: Independent George at Jan 22, 2008 12:34:30 PM
From what I remember, the first movie has something of a point about how Vietnam vets were disrespected upon their return from the war. The film has a fair amount of action, but only one death, and I believe that it's somewhat accidental. Rambo is forced to defend himself and in the scuffle the other guy falls off a cliff or out of a helicopter or something.
What's shocking is how that fairly modest, somewhat preachy film spawned two (and now three) sequels of almost sheer mayhem. The few minutes they take in each film to talk about peace and respect or whatever the films are supposed to be about are drowned out by scenes of Rambo shooting down aircraft with a bow and exploding arrows, or shooting guys from the hip with what is supposed to a vehicle-mounted weapon.
Posted by: d.cous. at Jan 22, 2008 12:36:54 PM
"Nothing - except probably Cecil B. DeMille pix, which I also haven't seen - comes close to the mid- to late-80's for excessive excess."
I think you're not too far off, assuming that you never saw Armageddon or the two Matrix sequels (though really, they could've been '80s movies). Actually, it seems like the 1970s were almost a fluke decade for Hollywood, since it didn't have it's own overblown genre (that I can think of).
What makes the 1980s interesting to me is that Hollywood (and actually, pop culture in general) went overboard on EVERYTHING. Particularly in Action films (probably the quintessential '80s genre), movie stars say the F-word like middle schoolers trying to be bad (literally, it's like they're not used to saying it), and every film has some gratuitous (as in not relevant to the story) nudity in it. Villains don't just get shot, their heads explode.
I wish someone could explain to me exactly what happened to aesthetic in the 1980s (perms, too much makeup, too much reverb in pop music, pop music in general, gratuitous violence in films). I really have no idea.
Posted by: d.cous. at Jan 22, 2008 12:58:48 PM
A parody movie "Hot Shots: Part Deux" starring Charlie Sheen offers a scene in which Sheen bedecked a la Rambo is shooting a machine gun with the spent brass piling up around him waste deep and a counter rolling at the bottom of the screen showing the number of "kills" in the six-digit category. It sounds like Stallone is trying to turn his productions into farce in imitation.
Posted by: PrahaPartizan at Jan 22, 2008 2:49:22 PM
For the record, Rocky V (the first one, not Rocky Balboa, the recently released one) has a retired Rocky, who has lost everything and returned to Philly, training a fighter (Tommy Gunn) with a similar Rocky story only to watch as "Don King" (I don't know the guy's movie name, but it's basically a parody of Don King) steal away Rocky's fighter for a big championship fight. After Tommy Gunn becomes champion people claim he is a paper champion and that Rocky is the true champion and then Gunn and Rocky have a street fight in which Rocky KOs him.
There was a Rambo III? How could I not know there was a Rambo III? What else could I have been doing when I was 12?
Posted by: AZ at Jan 22, 2008 5:37:36 PM
It's a long road
When you're on your own
And it hurts when
They tear your dreams apart
And every new town
Just seems to bring you down
Trying to find peace of mind
Can break your heart
It's a real war
Right outside your front door I tell ya
Out where they'll kill ya
You could use a friend
Where the road is
That's the place for me
Where I'm me in my own space
Where I'm free that's the place
I wanna be
'Cause the road is long yeah
Each step is only the beginning
No breaks just heartaches
Oh man is anybody winning
It's a long road
And it's hard as hell
Tell me what do you do
To survive
When they draw first blood
That's just the start of it
Day and night you gotta fight
To keep alive
It's a long road ...
Posted by: John J. at Jan 22, 2008 6:47:44 PM
sa...
if marginal benefit < marginal cost, then there would be no increase at all.
Posted by: JJ at Jan 22, 2008 7:41:43 PM
sa...
if marginal benefit < marginal cost, then there would be no increase at all.
Posted by: JJ at Jan 22, 2008 7:42:03 PM
JJ, you are right. I meant that the marginal utility
curve will flatten out faster than the marginal cost
curve.
Posted by: sa at Jan 23, 2008 12:47:51 AM
"There was a Rambo III? How could I not know there was a Rambo III? What else could I have been doing when I was 12?"
That would be "Rambo in Afghanistan"
I had forgotten about it, but I remember discussions of it from early in the decade
Posted by: Sidways at Jan 23, 2008 4:19:01 AM
If you look at the rise in deaths per film over the course of the timeline of action movies in general the point becomes clear. When the first Rambo came out the movie producers were most likely unsure about what ratings this sort of film would bring in. The make it with minimal deaths, with acceptance of the guy falling out of the helicopter, and just having the general amount of violence in the film as they did envoked a huge response with movie goers. This sparked a fire under an audience that wanted violent action movies pack full of blood, machine guns, explosions, and helicopters. With this fire, the movie industry wanted to fuel it, bigger explosions, more guns, and more deaths were a must! Out came Rambo 2-4 and with each, the desire for more explosions and more deaths grew. Now in 2008, 26 years after the original debut, the necessity for deaths in an action movies is a key ingriedient. If a producer put out an "action" movie with nobody dying in it that would not be much of a box office hit, nor much of an "action" movie.
Posted by: gh0540 at Jan 23, 2008 10:02:03 PM
This doesn't pass the BS test. IMDB says the 2008 film's running time is 93 minutes. For 2.59 people per minute to die, that means 240.87 people died during the entire movie. The fact that this doesn't produce a whole number makes the figure suspect, as does the notion that any viewer could make a specific count of 247 people dying on screen in 93 minutes. If the reviewer is counting off-screen deaths, well, then Schindler's List is the most violent movie ever made.
Posted by: asg at Jan 24, 2008 12:06:40 AM
What would be the numbers on a movie about dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Just wondering
Posted by: Mohjho at Jan 24, 2008 6:34:56 PM
I believe the count is at 237 deaths. And that's on screen, not off screen.
Posted by: R. Rambo at Jan 26, 2008 7:53:19 PM
Rambo III was unfortunately released just after the Russians had left Afghanistan, making its message politically moot. They probably left because they knew he was coming.
Posted by: robot at Jan 28, 2008 6:12:48 PM
Are these figures in-line with official inflation figures?
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