But then that raises a larger issue, one that has plagued fans of the Avengers franchise: The presence of The Vision - who can fly, shoot beams of radiation from his head, phase through stuff and has an Infinity Gem powering the whole shebang - makes Team Iron Man way too powerful. Imagine a god of thunder messing with the winged guy. Rounding out the list is a group of regular guys who are kind of good at a thing: Hawkeye, War Machine and Falcon.īut we can also use these individual ratings to see how every character would do one-on-one against every other character (using the maximum likelihood ratings to calculate individual matchup-level probabilities gives us a vastly larger sample of data to work with and provides a more holistic sense of each character’s power for example, how Thor performed against the Vision informs his chances against Ant-Man): Next comes a powerful group of artificially enhanced humans and several possessors of suits: Iron Man, Scarlet Witch, Captain America, Ant-Man, Black Widow, Winter Soldier, Black Panther and Spider-Man. You have heavies like Thor, The Vision and Hulk in a class of their own. The ratings confirm a lot of what we already know, including that there are different tiers of Avengers.
Here are the power ratings, plus each of the 14 character’s estimated win percentage against an average opponent. We’re going to use math to figure out how likely each Avenger is to win a fight, just like we’d do with college football: We’ll use the same methods to ascertain Hawkeye’s comparative strength that we use to evaluate the University of Iowa Hawkeyes football team.
I then calculated a numerical power rating for each contender based on their record using a system called maximum likelihood that is used in things like basketball and football analytics. Here’s how the matchups break down according to our respondents: We got 1,158 FiveThirtyEight social media followers to weigh in on 47,503 head-to-head matchups. He set up a site that asked users to identify which of 14 Avengers 3 they were familiar with, then cycle through matchups of those Avengers and identify the likely winner of a fight between the two. For some help, I reached out to friend-of-the-site James England, who by day is the chief technology officer at 321Forms but by night maintains a college football analytic system and develops killer Oscar predictions. I turned to the wisdom of the crowd, 2 controlling for notoriety to ensure that this wasn’t some gauche popularity contest. None of that cowboy “I think Hawkeye could totally beat Black Panther” crap I tried to pull during March Madness last year.
So we jumped into this minefield, with the full intention of objectively doing it right. There’s a vast amount of discussion on the internet about superhero matchups, but the kind of rigor that is applied to the question of “who would win” in the sports world isn’t used in the debate surrounding fictional characters who punch one another. And with “Captain America: Civil War” - a film that pits a whole bunch of costumed heroes against one another - taking that question to its logical conclusion this weekend, this is a great time to take a stab at figuring out which Avengers would actually win in a fight. He sees a real opportunity to mentor someone.“Who would win?” is one of the more fun, divisive debates that fans have - in sports, sure, but also in comic books and movies. “There were similarities we knew (Tony would) be attracted to in this kid, namely that he’s a technological genius as well. Not only does it set the stage for the upcoming Spider-Man: Homecoming (in theaters July 7, 2017) but also ties into the Peter/Tony dynamic seen earlier when Iron Man recruits the wide-eyed teenager for his squad. After May leaves, Peter looks in awe at the next-level Spider-tech and a neato Spider-symbol emanating from his wrist web shooters, seemingly a gift from his new billionaire best friend (and science bro) Tony Stark. His Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) checks in on him, and Peter tells her he got beaten up by “a big guy” named Steve - a reference to getting walloped by Cap. The second scene comes after all the credits have rolled and features Peter Parker (Tom Holland) tending to his bumps, bruises and a major-league black eye after his first massive superhero throwdown as Spider-Man.