It is no spoiler to say that, in this weekend's Man of Steel, chaos and mass destruction are leading players, just as deserving of a spot on the marquee as Henry Cavill and Amy Adams. As the marketing material makes clear, the survivors of Krypton have little regard for our planet's puny architecture, which they reduce to neat piles of shattered glass and twisted metal, like wood chips for their superhuman playground of death.
Quick, run to your nearest theater!
This is nothing new, of course; we've come to expect mass destruction in our summer movies, which allow us to envision from an air conditioned place of comfort the global meltdown we've been trained to expect by years of alarmist political rhetoric. It's like a game of chicken; if one movie destroys half a city, the next one must one-up it and wreck the entire thing. With a huge number of gigantic blockbuster films out this summer, it's worth examining just how much carnage we're paying big money to see, and taking stock of all the urban zones that are being leveled on the big screen. Is your hometown being blown apart this year?!
Man of Steel: Metropolis
Star Trek Into Darkness: San Francisco, London
Iron Man 3: Los Angeles
Bad news for Tony Stark: your home and all your possessions are now waste at the bottom of a cliff. Good news: at least it took a bunch of missiles to get that done, so you really had a nice spread there for a while. The Chinese Theater in LA also got blown to pieces, which is pretty cool because the company that owns it paid for that to happen.
World War Z: Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston, Rome, Newark, St. Louis, Houston, Jerusalem
This Is The End: Los Angeles
Pacific Rim: San Francisco, Manila, Dubai
Elysium: Basically Everywhere
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Set in the year 2159, Earth is largely a wrecked, smoking graveyard for poor people, while the rich live in a giant spinning rim in space.
The World's End: London
Honorable Mention
Fast and Furious 6 did some damage to London and really destroyed a long, elevated highway in Spain, so don't forget that!