There are many subjective ways to measure the greatness of an action hero. But one website has taken what they see as an objective measure of the situation and declared that there is emphatically one “ultimate action hero.” And his name is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
BetVictor.com says they analyzed “the five biggest action films from 10 of the most popular action heroes on the planet, charting every punch thrown, every high-speed chase, and every villain defeated, and placed them” into an algorithm. It gave the candidates scores based on a variety of weighted factors including box office grosses, Rotten Tomatoes scores, catchphrases used. After all the numbers were tabulated, Arnold came out on top.
Here Is Their #5 Ranking For The Ultimate Action Heroes:
2) Jason Statham
3.) Bruce Willis
4) Jet Li
5) Tom Cruise
You’ll find the breakdown of all the stats on their website, but here are a few of the “action statistics” for each of the contenders. (Not surprisingly, Schwarzenegger ranked first in the ‘Catchphrases Used’ category.)
I’m not entirely sure how scientific these findings are; there are plenty of great action stars who were not considered (Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and John Wayne just to name a few right off the top of my head) and only weighing each star’s top five movies certainly affects things as well. But at least the outcome is correct. Clearly, we can all agree with that. He was the Last Action Hero, and now he is also the ultimate action hero.