10 Movie Characters Who Had To Kill Themselves To Win

4. Joe - Looper

Rian Johnson's ingenious sci-fi thriller takes place in a future where undesirable people are sent into the past and murdered by assassins known as "loopers."

But in order to avoid any loose ends and "close the loop", a looper's final job will eventually see them assassinating their future, retired selves.

Over the course of the movie, looper Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) comes into conflict with his older future self (Bruce Willis), who plots to assassinate a child, Cid (Pierce Gagnon), who as an adult is "destined" to cause the death of Old Joe's wife.

In the film's climax, Cid's mother Sara (Emily Blunt) puts herself between her son and Old Joe, with Sara's imminent death presumed to serve as the catalyst for Cid becoming a future tyrant.

To prevent this, young Joe does the only thing he can - he grabs his Blunderbuss and shoots himself in the chest, killing himself and therefore eliminating his future self from existence.

While in most of these movies the hero still managed to live after battling themselves, sadly Looper's intimately causal laws of time travel forced Joe to pay the ultimate price. But in terms of preventing a chaotic future, he certainly accomplished his task.