10 Movie Characters You Didn't Realise Secretly Died In Movies

5. The Ghostbusters - Ghostbusters

Early on in Ghostbusters, Egon (Harold Ramis) warns his ghost-hunting cohorts that they should never cross the streams of their proton packs, lest they cause "all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light." Or as Ray (Dan Aykroyd) puts it, "Total protonic reversal."

But at the end of the film, Egon desperately tells them to disregard his prior advice, with the team crossing their streams to defeat Gozer (Slavitza Jovan) and save the world. Or so it seems.

Yet a prominent fan theory suggests that crossing the streams actually killed the Ghostbusters just as Egon said it would, and so their subsequent celebration and the entirety of Ghostbusters II simply amounts to the team being stuck in purgatory.

This would explain why the sequel is such a programmatic rehash of the original, and why all of New York seems to have amnesia about a giant anthropomorphic marshmallow attacking the city.

We'll have to wait and see how the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife ultimately figures into the theory, though.