(Credits: Far Out)
In this modern day and age, few things guarantee more feverish internet activity than the tragic death of a movie star – and now science has proven which death was the most tragic of all.
To find out how a person even begins to quantify which human tragedy is worse than another, we need to turn to the good folks at Stat Significant, who are old hands at coming up with wacky scientific methods to prove all sorts of weird things. Want to know which movie characters are the most terrifying in history, or which sequel is the most polarising of all? Stat Significant’s Daniel Parris has got your back.
Fascinatingly, to begin drilling down on whose death hurt the most on a worldwide scale, Parris derived his data from a source you mightn’t necessarily have expected: Wikipedia. Now, I know you’ve just been hit by a flashback of a high school teacher or university professor yelling at you for using that much-maligned internet encyclopedia as a source for one of your essays. But, according to Parris, Wikipedia is now on the up and up.
“The online encyclopedia has since come a long way, now serving as ChatGPT’s default training dataset,” Parris reassured his readers, perhaps unaware that that statement isn’t as reassuring as he thinks. Sure, in theory, anyone can still add false, misleading (and often hilarious) nonsense to any Wikipedia page, but hey, at least it’s training the AI to make the human race obsolete!
All gripes about Artificial Intelligence aside, it can’t be denied that everyone uses Wikipedia these days, and most celebrities’ pages are so exhaustive that they often serve “as a living memorial, offering digital permanence.” This is especially pertinent for Parris because, upon news of a celebrity’s passing hitting the internet, millions upon millions of people immediately flock to their Wikipedia page. This makes the site a great indicator of collective grieving in the internet age.
(Credits: Far Out / De’Andre Bush)
Before compiling his data based on how many people visited an actor’s Wikipedia page in the year following their deaths, though, Parris had to do some, shall we say, creative science-ing. He knew that a modern tragic passing would receive significantly more page views than that of a tragic death from the years before Wikipedia even existed.
So, he constructed an algorithm that estimated annual web traffic based on how many years have elapsed since an actor’s birth. Does this make sense? Um, sort of, but it also kind of sounds like mumbo jumbo pulled from the ether. Having said that, I can’t think of any other way to level the playing field between the death of, say, Robert Redford, which happened in 2025, and James Dean, all the way back in 1955. Science is hard.
Anyway, with all that throat-clearing out of the way, it’s time to reveal who science claims is the most tragic movie star death in history. Shockingly, the answer is Elvis Presley, whose web traffic was calculated to be 1013% above expectation, after Parris’ algorithm was applied. Personally, I don’t really think of Elvis as a movie star, despite the fact that he made more than 30 movies, so this answer doesn’t really sit well with me. Still, I can’t argue with science, can I? No, but I can cast my eye further down Parris’ list to see who came after Elvis.
Interestingly, the three actors whose tragic demises were closest to Elvis’ in terms of public interest were Judy Garland (624%), Marilyn Monroe (620%), and Bruce Lee (370%), with Heath Ledger rounding out the top five (341%). Other actors who made the list included Brittany Murphy, River Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Brandon Lee. To me, this proves that the public will always be most fascinated by the actors who die unexpectedly young, and forever seem frozen in amber to us as one character or as representatives of an era. Elvis, though? Not for me.
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source faroutmagazine.co.uk ’
