The Hemsworth Games: Who's the best, Chris or Liam?

The Hemsworth family have been waging a twin-pronged assault on the box-office for years: brothers Chris and Liam have single-handedly changed the perception of Australian movie stars, to the point where Crocodile Dundee is but a distant, embarrassing memory.

[Loki & Thor share a cuddle after Shanghai poster mix-up]

With 'Thor: The Dark World' already on general release and 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire' not out until later in November, Chris and Liam won't have to face one another at the cinema just yet, but we're curious as to which brother would come out on top if you were to pit them against one another in an epic, if meaningless, face-off. Let The Hemsworth Games begin!

Round 1. Total box-office
If we're squaring off the Hemsworth brothers against each other, the best way to start is to analyse cold, hard data: money talks in Hollywood and there can be only one victor at the box-office. Unsurprisingly, God of Thunder Chris comes out on top with a total worldwide take of $2.5 billion – although $1.5 billion of that came with a little help from his Avenger friends. Compared to his big bro, Liam can only muster a $1.2 billion box-office total, but that total will rise in time with three Hunger Games movies still on the slate. Nonetheless, Hemsworth the Elder's superhero salary puts him one-nil up.
Score: Chris 1-0 Liam

Round 2. Rotten Tomatoes average score
As you well know, there is no objective way to rate and review movies, what with it being a subjective medium and all, but the Rotten Tomatoes meter is perhaps the best analytical tool we have at our disposal. Adding up the aggregate scores from all of the Hemsworth motion pictures and dividing them up to find the average, we can see that Chris produces the more critically-acclaimed movies with an average 'Fresh' rating of 73.6% (with 'Star Trek' rated the highest at 95%). Liam, on the other hand, doesn't fare so well with reviewers, scoring a 'Rotten' average rating of just 43% ('The Hunger Games' his biggest critical hit with a rating of 84%). The numbers don't lie: the point goes to Kirk's Dad.
Score: Chris 2-0 Liam

Round 3. Worst movie
Already this competition is beginning to look a little one-sided: being an Avenger does tend to give you an advantage in all walks of life. However, Hemsworth hits count for nothing in this round – the brother with the worst movie must concede the point. Abandoning the Rotten Tomatoes rating system for now as it can't ever really capture the horrors of a true stinker, we can still see that both brothers have reasons to be ashamed. Liam's biggest flop to date is Harrison Ford thriller 'Paranoia', a clichéd techno-thriller that feels 10 years out of date, but seeing as it hasn't received a UK release, we deem the worst Hemsworth handiwork to be Chris's abominable remake of 'Red Dawn' – a movie so ill thought-out, it couldn't even decide what kind of Asians it wanted the villains to be. Liam is back in the game – but don't think we've forgiven him 'The Last Song'.
Score: Chris 2-1 Liam

[Jennifer Lawrence talks her most cringe-worthy moments]

Round 4. Fan appreciation
Again, if we must assign numbers to unquantifiable things like the emotion you humans call 'love', then we can only use the data available to us. Googling 'Chris/Liam Hemsworth fans' reveals results that are too scattershot for us to draw any meaningful conclusion as to which brother loves his fans the most, so we're defaulting to Twitter. Sadly for Mr 'I don't want to become over-exposed on the internet', Chris's complete lack of a Twitter page means the point defaults to brother Liam, who regularly keeps over 500,000 of his fans up-to-date – even if he only ever seems to tweet about his forthcoming movies and not, say, what he had for lunch like the rest of us. A bittersweet victory but a leveller all the same.
Score: Chris 2-2 Liam

Round 5. Love life
Let's not turn this into a competition about who loves their significant other more. Please. We would never be so crass. Ahem. This is a popularity contest folks: we're just interested in which brother has the more fascinating love life, not which one is the most romantic or gifted lover (that's best left to the imagination). So while Chris's marriage to Fast & Furious actress Elsa Pataky is wholesome and admirable (and their baby girl India Rose is TOTES ADORBZ), give us Liam's spiky on-off relationship with controversy magnet Miley Cyrus any day of the week. Hemsworth the Younger pulls into a surprise lead (let's not split hairs: mainly because the relationship is currently in the 'off' position).
Score: Chris 2-3 Liam

Round 6. Most bizarre trivia
Trivia can be used as the measure of a man: the things he's seen and done, the places he's been, the wacky mishaps he's suffered along the way. Chris has seven years' more life experience than Liam, who has so far let his romance define his achievements. One Liam Hemsworth fan page we found listed his trivia as follows: 1) Dated Miley Cyrus; 2) Is the younger brother of Chris Hemsworth; 3) Dated Miley Cyrus again. Chris doesn't seem to have many wild tales of excess or bizarre encounters, but read this trivia entry and tell me it's not a winner: "Chris Hemsworth has had prior experience with wielding a hammer in 'Thor', having worked as a builder in Australia for a few years." I'd give the point to the person that researched that fact if I could, but Chris will have to accept it on their behalf. All square going into the final round...
Score: Chris 3-3 Liam

Round 7. Soap experience

So it has come to this. The Hemsworth boys have proved themselves to be on an even keel – one has the box-office brawn, the other has the tabloid romance, one has critical acclaim, the other has... er, a Twitter account. The only way we can possibly separate them is by miles on the clock, and in Australia, you're only as good as the hours you put into soap acting. Serendipitously, as if they knew a face-off like this would one day pit them against one another, Chris and Liam starred in opposing soaps; Chris as Kim Hyde in Home & Away, Liam as Josh Taylor in Neighbours. Wikipedia deals the decisive blow in The Hemsworth Games, revealing that Chris starred in 171 episodes, compared to Liam's 25 appearances on Ramsay Street. Contest over.
And the winner is... Chris 4-3 Liam

There you have it it: Chris Hemsworth edges it at the last, despite a valiant comeback from his little brother Liam, who still has the best part of a decade to win over critics and audiences alike. We can now definitely state that Chris is the best Hemsworth, and that he- hang on, it says here on Google that there's a LUKE Hemsworth too? Oh, just forget it. We're not doing all this again.