10 Awful Movie Death Retcons EVERYONE Hated

Killing off a popular or even iconic character in a movie franchise is an undeniably huge gamble - get it right and you've given fans a moment they won't ever forget, but screw it up and they'll curse you forever more.

But sometimes, even if it makes sense for a character to die, the filmmakers simply can't let them stay dead, and due to their prior popularity, they're inexplicably resurrected in a future sequel.

And so, we come to the ever-controversial act of retconning - retroactively tampering with the story to bring a dead character back to life.

While film fans might debate about precisely what does and doesn't constitute a retcon, it's always frustrating to watch a movie where a character is revived from the dead in a fashion which clearly indicates it wasn't part of the original plan.

And that's 100% the case with these 10 movies, which dusted off beloved dead characters yet failed to put in the storytelling leg-work to have it all make sense.

While fans were certainly glad to see some of these characters back, the mechanics of their resurrection were either horrendously lazy or absolutely impossible to take seriously...

Harry Hart's (Colin Firth) death in the first Kingsman film was brilliantly done - after massacring a church full of ne'er-do-well's against his will, he's shot in the head by villain Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson).

It's a shocking and devastating moment which provides red-hot motivation for Eggsy (Taron Egerton) to kill Valentine at the end of the movie, and as much as fans loved Harry, it seemed like there was no possible way for him to come back.

All the same, it was soon enough announced that Colin Firth would be back in sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and following intense fan speculation about how he might return, filmmaker Matthew Vaughn basically just threw his hands up and went, "Nanomachines, son."

It's revealed that, moments after Harry was shot in the head, Ginger (Halle Berry) arrived on the scene and encased his head in protective "alpha gel," before his damaged brain was repaired with nanomachines back at the Kingsman lab.

Beyond being resoundingly stupid, it's a revelation which effectively cheapened every other death in the series, because why couldn't anyone be brought back with this tech?

More to the point, Harry's death in the first Kingsman actually meant something on a character level for Eggsy, and the sequel undid it simply because Harry was popular.

On top of this, saddling him with amnesia was some soap opera-caliber storytelling. Come on...