Punch him in the crotch and it will break your wrist, but what does getting smacked in the face by Colossus, the steel titan in Deadpool, feel like?

The comics are pretty clear about how hefty Colossus is. Piotr Rasputin is (when transformed) seven-and-a-half feet tall and weighs 500 pounds. Basically, he is André the Giant, but made of steel. So how hard would Colossus hit?

Rasputin is canonically an athlete, making the strength of Olympic-grade boxers a good place to start. One study published in 2005 found that super heavyweight boxers weighing around 240 pounds could punch a synthetic face with 4,350 Netwons of force on average. That’s like getting kicked in the head by a pro soccer player during a free kick.

The study also found that this force scales linearly with boxer weight—double the weight, double the force. Since comic book Colossus is twice as heavy as the heaviest boxers in the study, he might be able to strike with 8,700 Newtons of force. Imagine an alligator snapping shut on your head, but worse.

But what if Colossus was made out of actual steel? (Colossus rearranges his body into “organic steel” that is apparently less dense.) This is harder to estimate because we don’t know his volume, but a back-of-the-envelope calculation using the density of a common steel alloy says that Colossus may actually weigh closer to 2,300 pounds, or a metric ton.

If that’s the case, and punching force still scales with weight, then a haymaker from a real steel Colossus would pack around 40,000 Newtons of force. You know, like a major league batter using your head for practice or Tyrannosaurus rex using it as a chew toy. I’d rather cut off my own hand than fight him too.

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IMAGES: Twentieth Century Fox

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