A disaster analyst has pegged the damage done to Metropolis during the climactic battle between Superman, General Zod and his forces in Man of Steel at $700 billion–that’s five times what The Avengers would have cost New York, or roughly fifteen times the cost of the damage done in the real-life September 11 terror attacks on the city. They also guess that the financial fallout from the attack would ultimately end up costing $2 trillion.In fairness, there were six Avengers to fight off the aliens. And while one Superman may not be fighting nearly as many villains, each Kryptonian is probably as powerful as at least 150 of the disposable Chitauri. Can you imagine Hawkeye taking on Faora? He got his butt kicked by Black Widow!Of course, given that Metropolis is a fictional city and we don’t know much about its layout, property values, etc., beyond what’s already on the screen, there’s an element of blind faith here; Buzzfeed reports that “Charles Watson worked with his team at Watson Technical Consulting to model and anticipate the damage done to Metropolis, both in the form of human casualties and monetary cost. They ran analyses of the World Engine ground zero in Central Manhattan and central Chicago, finding that the major damage would be a mile in diameter.”About 400,000 would be dead or missing and presumed dead, with another million people injured in the Kryptonians’ attack on Metropolis, WTC found. The analysts compared the impact on the city to that of the destructive force of the nuclear bomb that hit Nagasaki (ironically, a plot device in Scott Snyder and Jim Lee’s Superman Unchained #1, out last week), except without the radiation and fallout.A final note, for those tut-tutting about how Superman is the worst thing ever to happen to the world: there’s an estimate that 87% of the damage to Smallville was caused by friendly fire, with billions of dollars of aircraft, satellites, and other hardware lost during the ensuing conflict.
