Killing characters is hard. Creators have such a strong connection to the people they've brought to life that to heartlessly murder them is emotionally draining. Unless you're George R.R. Martin, who can't sleep unless he's killed a fan favourite. From an audience perspective it can all get a little predictable. Marvel keep coming under fire for their repeated plot trait of making us think a character's dead before revealing it was all a trick. When they do finally bite the bullet and kill a hero audiences will be so jaded they'll expect them to turn up again half an hour later. Although that's nothing compared the comics, where big names are habitually written out then swiftly resurrected. It was for a long time the unwritten rule that the only two characters who would actually stay dead were Uncle Ben and Bucky Barnes, and even that's been broken. All this means that our heroes have a totally narrative induced invulnerability; they can survive anything simply because they're the protagonist. Peter Jackson is particularly bad with this; throughout The Lord Of The Rings there are countless death fake-outs (most prominently Aragorn in The Two Towers), while The Hobbit throws the dwarves about like rag-dolls. Even when the decision is made to kill a fan favourite that doesn't mean it'll make it to the finished product. You often hear about TV characters who were saved from the chop thanks to fan intervention (Vince Gilligan was planning to end the first season of Breaking Bad by bumping Jesse off), but in film it's a little different. Produced in isolation from audiences, there's less opportunity to reconsider plans for deaths. Sometimes though the film-makers decide to save a character at the last minute. Here are ten of those movie characters who narrowly avoided not making the end credits.
