9 Creators Who Regretted Killing Off Movie Characters

Pacific Rim: Uprising was a crushing disappointment for many reasons, not least that it brought back the first film's breakout character, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), for a thankless cameo that ended with her totally pointless demise in a helicopter accident.

The decision to kill the fan favourite character without even giving her the opportunity to get involved in the action or die in a particularly meaningful way was hugely unpopular with fans.

Writer-director Steven S. DeKnight later admitted that due to decisions above his head, her arc was whittled down into something more disposable:

"There's a thousand things I would change, large and small. There are things in the movie that will always bother me that no one will ever notice. And then there are things, like giving Mako's death more weight, that I think people do notice. The thing that really changed, and I have to admit I don't think for the better, was the connective support around that event slowly got chipped away for various reasons – mostly budget and time.

Where the events itself, because the movie now moves so fast, is a bit of a blip and doesn't land as fully as I would have liked. There were other scenes, some of them we never shot, some of them we shot and cut... For me it was a great regret because I loved that character. I loved Rinko [Kikuchi] and I don't think, ultimately, her death had the weight that it deserved, through various creative decisions, some my own, some outside my control.

You can't fault the honesty here - it's not so much that DeKnight regrets the idea of killing Mako, which absolutely could've worked, but the utterly rushed, flippant way in which she's taken out.