Around $200 million worth of tickets have been sold to screenings of Man of Steel thus far, with fans around the world eager to behold Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan's serious new take on the world's most famous superhero. Along with a big dose of sci-fi detail and an angst-filled origin story (and maybe some religious allegory), moviegoers were treated to a cataclysmic display of carnage and destruction. (Light spoilers below.)

When Superman (Henry Cavill) and his nemesis General Zod (Michael Shannon) duke it out for almost the entire third act of the movie, their incredible speed and power are largely on display in Metropolis, the fictional city that is largely based on New York.

In a study done exclusively for BuzzFeed, scientist and longtime disaster expert Charles Watson worked with his team at Watson Technical Consulting to model and anticipate the damage done to Metropolis, both in the form of human casualties and monetary cost. They ran analyses of the World Engine ground zero in Central Manhattan and central Chicago, finding that the major damage would be a mile in diameter.

WTC estimates that, in the days after the attack, the known damage would already be stunning: 129,000 known killed, over 250,000 missing (most of whom would have also died), and nearly a million injured.

The impact, WTC writes, "seemed to be similar to an air burst from a 20kt nuclear explosion in terms of shock effects, but without the radiation or thermal effects."

In terms of the strictly physical damage done to the city, the initial estimate is $700 billion. To put that in context, 9/11's physical damage cost $55 billion, with a further economic impact of $123 billion.

Overall, WTC estimates that the damage would be $2 trillion.

The numbers are staggering, but then, so is the imagery. Superman and Zod's battle is one of epic proportions, these two superhumans from a distant planet laying waste to the gleaming city. They toss each other into buildings, with each crash easily blowing holes through the architecture and sending the towers — and the many people inside of them — free-falling to the broken pavement below.

The rain of searing wreckage blew streets apart; people became trapped under fallen buildings and overturned cars, crushed beneath facades and hot and twisted metal. The onslaught from the back-and-forth battle was random and merciless; the two Kryptonians paid little attention to the damage they were doing to anything but each other.

In the end, Superman wins the day. But at what cost?