10 Franchises That Killed Off The Wrong Person

In real life, death is a multi-faceted thing. It's an inevitability, something to dread, something to accept, something which touches everyone's life and an opportunity to recite verbatim that poem about the clocks from Four Wedding And A Funeral. On the big screen, meanwhile, it's mostly boiled down to a plot point in the accepted Hollywood screenwriting structure. It's a bit of cheap emotional manipulation.

Filmmakers are aware of the associations the audience has with death in their everyday life, and they exploit them. Look, here a character has been killed off. You should be sad like when a person dies in real life. And oftentimes it works - these fictional people you grew attached to being cruelly snatched away inspires something approaching grief. Grief than can be dealt with by eating more popcorn, true, but grief nonetheless.

Then there are the character killings that are met with a very different response: anger, and not on the road to acceptance. Anger that it was a cheap thing to do, that it made no narrative sense, that it was a waste of a character. Even worse when it's a franchise going forward, having lost a key cast member.

Whether due to contract disputes, bad writing or just poor judgement, movies have gotten rid of characters who would've been bettered served with bigger parts, a more noble demise, or no demise at all. Here are ten franchises that killed off the wrong person.