10 Movie Cliches Everybody Hates

4. The Dead Wife/Girlfriend As Hero Motivation

Killing off the wife/girlfriend/lover is such a widespread cliche in cinema that it's even got its own specific name - "fridging."

It's a trope that lazily attempts to heighten the drama of the (predominantly male) hero's journey, while generally reducing the agency of the focal female character, on a count of her being dead and all.

Christopher Nolan's had a hard-on for this trope through large swaths of his filmography, to the point that many have already joked about who he might be seeking to cast as the dead wife in his next movie.

But most recently, Deadpool 2 saw Wade Wilson's (Ryan Reynolds) fiancée Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) killed in the opening moments of the movie, despite many fans expecting her to have an expanded role in the sequel.

This was reportedly a result of scheduling conflicts with Baccarin, but even so, it felt like an extraordinarily lame solution to the actress' absence. On the flip side, she was ultimately resuscitated via time travel, and the Once Upon A Deadpool re-edit even flatly called out the fridging.

At least we recently got to see a reverse-fridging with Steve Trevor's (Chris Pine) demise in Wonder Woman, but honestly, wouldn't it just be nice to not have the love interest, be they woman or man, dismissively killed in order to cheaply heighten the drama? It's Hollywood screenwriting at its most stock and unimaginative.