10 Movie Characters Who Had To Die To Win

As far as action heroines go, Ellen Ripley may have been dealt one of the worst hands in cinematic history when it came time to put together an Alien threequel. After fighting tooth and nail to be the sole survivor of Ridley Scott’s “haunted house in space” original, she was summarily rewarded with bigger guns and a far more prepared crew to handle scarier foes like the Alien Queen in James Cameron’s action-oriented follow-up Aliens.

Not a bad trade-off, right? Well it wouldn’t have been, if beleaguered director David Fincher’s uber-bleak Alien 3 didn’t open with the death of Newt, Hicks, and Bishop—or every non-Ripley survivor of the last film, to put it another way.

But hey, at least Ripley’s now ready to kick more ass and more prepared than ever to face the xenomorph scourge, right?

Sure—or she could spend the film struggling to escape corrupt prison planet officers and psychotic prisoners as well as the alien itself, only to end up impregnated with an alien queen by the film’s close. Luckily, Ripley is granted a badass shot at action movie redemption when she chooses to swan dive into a lake of molten lead, killing herself and the embryonic alien queen rather than allowing the unborn monster make its way into the hands of the shadowy Weyland Yutani corporation.