10 Movies That Weren’t Brave Enough To Kill The Main Character

1. Riggan Thomson - Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance)

As you may have deduced, I am not the biggest fan of ambiguous endings, or is-he/isn't-he dead third act twists. When Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) puts a loaded gun to his head at the climax of his Raymond Carver broadway adaptation, I fully thought that was it for the character - and it should've been. Everything that happens to Riggan over the course of the film leads to that moment; his slowly-unravelling mental state, his having to deal with a superior actor in the guise of Mike Shiner, the dressing-down he receives from harsh Broadway critic Tabitha Dickinson.

Once he sees how much attention his pants-only public meltdown in Times Square gets him from the public, and the respect from his daughter Sam that this grants him, only then does he realise that his increasing madness is going to be what defines him as an actor. Killing himself on stage is the final step in that sequence; it is the beautifully tragic end Riggan deserves as a character. To have him survive by flubbing the suicide means that he gets to witness Tabitha's rave review of his play (validation he doesn't need by this point) and further burying-the-hatchet scenes with his daughter (also unwarranted at this point). While his dismissal of the Birdman persona is important, it didn't have to exist in this scene. What's worse, to cap it all off, he promptly steps up onto a ledge and seemingly flies off into the sky.

Birdman would have retained a wider range of emotional payoff had they unambiguously left the ending at Riggan shooting himself live on stage - without the need for some fantastical ending where he literally flies off into the sunset, which is far too ham-fisted and unnecessary an ending. Which other movies should have had the balls to kill off the main character? Share any more down in the comments.