10 Movie Franchises That Stupidly Killed Off Their Best Character

Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is unquestionably one of the greatest movie heroines of all time, Terminator 2 cementing her status as a badass mother bear beyond compare. Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 may be the series' most iconic character, but Sarah is its most richly drawn.

Yet Sarah was ultimately absent from the belated threequel, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, due to Linda Hamilton feeling that Sarah was a "negligible character" in the script.

Sarah reportedly ended up dying half-way through the original story, and so the script was overhauled to remove Sarah entirely, save for a fleeting mention that she died from leukemia between movies.

Needless to say, this off-screen death left fans hugely disappointed, and it would've made far more sense to temporarily write Sarah out, either having her be kidnapped or MIA somehow, but in turn leaving it open for the character to return.

Firmly closing the door on Sarah left a sour taste, enough that the most recent sequel, Terminator: Dark Fate, decided to effectively ignore everything after Terminator 2 and bring Sarah back from the dead as a battle-hardened warrior.

Neat though it was to see Hamilton back in the role, after two prior dud sequels fans had largely lost interest in the series' increasingly muddy approach to continuity, and so Dark Fate bombed at the box office regardless.

And killing off Sarah's son John (Edward Furlong) in an opening flashback didn't help it at all. Did this franchise learn nothing about offing beloved characters?