5 Oddly Specific Movie Tropes Hollywood Is Obsessed With Right Now

4. Bad Guy Dies On The Edge Of A Cliff

Mission Impossible Fallout
Paramount

You know how most movies go. More often than not, the good guy saves the day and the bad guy is killed or incarcerated, and even though there are literally thousands of ways for that scenario to play out, one particular style of death has stood out quite recently: death by cliff!

In Black Panther, villain Erik Killmonger chooses to surrender to T'Challa, but rather than being taken prisoner, opts to die peacefully while resting on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a beautiful Wakandan sunset during his final moments. N'aww.

Black Panther ending Killmonger death
Walt Disney Studios

Then, in the Alicia Vikander-starring Tomb Raider reboot, merc-for-hire Mathias Vogel has his ass beat by Lara right next to a massive drop. She then shoves a contaminated finger down his throat (yum), before booting him off said drop and sending him to a nasty death.

tomb raider 2018 ending vogel death
Warner Bros

Recently, Mission: Impossible Fallout's August Walker was clinging to a cliff with his bare hands while climbing after super-spy Ethan Hunt, before being caught in the face and dragged to his (bloody) doom by a metal cargo hook.

Then, The Equalizer 2 shook things up a little; baddie Dave York (Pedro Pascal) is stabbed atop a giant tower and kicked down to the ocean below, dying a brutal death at Denzel's hands. It feels very much like the Tomb Raider moment, and both scenes even share a top-down shot that shows the villain plummeting to the ground.

Oh, and Luke Skywalker also died on the edge of a cliff, and while he wasn't the antagonist, he was a bit of an arse for most of the runtime.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!