Can Sean Bean Actually Survive a Movie?

We calculate the odds that Hollywood’s most expendable hero will make it through Jupiter Ascending. 

You never forget the first time you saw Sean Bean die. Mine was during The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring, as he gasped out a final monologue after being showered with enemy arrows, redeeming himself after acting like a prick for most of the movie. But it’s not always about karmic justice with Bean: In Game of Thrones, he played an upstanding example of nobility and still lost his head. In between, he’s been shot, stabbed, drawn and quartered, hung, and even crushed to death under a giant burning antenna cradle.

Bean’s made such a reputation for himself as an adept corpse that he’s become the subject of numerous death compilation videos, a genre that your grandparents could have only dreamed about. You have to hand it to him: The man dies spectacularly well.




With the release of the Wachowskis’ sprawling space opera, Jupiter Ascending, upon us we have one big question: What are the odds that Bean’s character, Stinger Apini, survives? Well, the math isn’t that tricky. Out of 74 movies and 25 television shows, we’ve confirmed 25 total fatalities, which would give him a roughly one in four chance of dying in Jupiter Ascending if there was no further context. But there is further context: The Wachowskis love to kill secondary characters. The Matrix Trilogy did not end well for the supporting cast and Cloud Atlas, which arguably didn’t end well for anyone, featured some headliners eating dirt. If you’re going to make some pre-screening bets, we recommend paying the deathsayers out double.

We’d take that bet.

Photos by Photo: Richard Foreman/TNT/Everett Collection

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