![\"The](\"https:\/\/cdn1.faroutmagazine.co.uk\/uploads\/1\/2025\/05\/The-worst-decade-to-be-the-main-character-in-a-movie-according-to-science-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
<\/p>\n(Credits: Far Out)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Sat 4 October 2025 21:45, UK <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In this modern day and age, few things guarantee more feverish internet activity than the tragic death of a movie star \u2013 and now science<\/a> has proven which death was the most tragic of all.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> in history, or which sequel is the most polarising of all? Stat Significant\u2019s Daniel Parris has got your back.<\/p>\n Fascinatingly, to begin drilling down on whose death hurt the most on a worldwide scale, Parris derived his data from a source you mightn\u2019t necessarily have expected: Wikipedia. Now, I know you\u2019ve 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. <\/p>\n \u201cThe online encyclopedia has since come a long way, now serving as ChatGPT\u2019s default training dataset,\u201d Parris reassured his readers, perhaps unaware that that statement isn\u2019t 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\u2019s training the AI to make the human race obsolete!<\/p>\n All gripes about Artificial Intelligence aside, it can\u2019t be denied that everyone uses Wikipedia these days, and most celebrities\u2019 pages are so exhaustive that they often serve \u201cas a living memorial, offering digital permanence.\u201d This is especially pertinent for Parris because, upon news of a celebrity\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a>(Credits: Far Out \/ De\u2019Andre Bush)<\/p>\n Before compiling his data based on how many people visited an actor\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n So, he constructed an algorithm that estimated annual web traffic based on how many years have elapsed since an actor\u2019s 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\u2019t think of any other way to level the playing field between the death of, say, Robert Redford, which happened in 2025<\/a>, and James Dean, all the way back in 1955. Science is hard.<\/p>\n Anyway, with all that throat-clearing out of the way, it\u2019s 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\u2019 algorithm was applied. Personally, I don\u2019t really think of Elvis as a movie star, despite the fact that he made more than 30 movies, so this answer doesn\u2019t really sit well with me. Still, I can\u2019t argue with science, can I? No, but I can cast my eye further down Parris\u2019 list to see who came after Elvis.<\/p>\n Interestingly, the three actors whose tragic demises were closest to Elvis\u2019 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<\/a> or as representatives of an era. Elvis, though? Not for me.<\/p>\n![\"Hollywood](\"https:\/\/cdn1.faroutmagazine.co.uk\/uploads\/1\/2024\/04\/Hollywood-Hollywood-Sign-Movie-Film-Cinema-General-Far-Out-Magazine-1024x768.jpg\")
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