10 Great Movie Characters Killed Off Immediately In Sequels

There are plenty of metrics by which a movie's success can be measured. Of course, there is critical reception, among critics and audiences alike, but arguably the most important, particularly when being judged by the studio that produced it, is box office numbers.

If a movie is deemed to be successful, and profitable, particularly these days there will likely be a sequel on the horizon. In certain cases, there will be more sequels than ever would have been thought necessary or possible.

With these sequels either furthering existing stories or telling completely new ones, there will almost always be new characters introduced. This usually means that there isn't room for every main character from the previous movie, and while they can be written out of a story in literally limitless ways, a quick death is always a popular option.

Instead of just removing the character from the franchise, these ten movies brought them back just to immediately kill them off. Whether to prove the threat of a new villain, make way for a new character in a similar role, or even in certain cases because the actor demanded it, these great characters did appear in the sequel, but not for long.

It was unclear in the build-up to James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad whether it would be a reboot or a sequel to David Ayer’s 2016 outing. In reality, the movie was something of a mix of the two. There were both new and returning characters, the latter including Rick Flag, Harley Quinn, and Amanda Waller, but there was no mention of their mission in Midway City from five years prior.

The movie boasted an incredibly impressive cast list, ridiculously big to the point that it would have been impossible for everyone advertised to play a major role. Instead, Gunn split the squad into two, with the first team featuring the likes of Savant, Blackguard, Javelin, TDK, Weasel, Mongal, Flag, and Quinn acting as a diversion. Most were killed.

There was one more returning character from the second DCEU outing back in 2016 in the form of Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang. The Aussie with the pink unicorn fetish however didn’t survive the ambush on Corto Maltese like Flag and Quinn. He, along with the majority of the first team, was brutally murdered on the beach while Bloodsport and co. sauntered unmolested on the other side of the island.

This begs the question, why bother bringing him back at all?