Anyone Can Die / Film

As a Death Trope, contains many spoilers. Tread with care.

Times where Anyone Can Die in Film.

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• Movie critic Joe Bob Briggs has long made this trope his fundamental statement about what makes a good horror movie: "Anyone can die at any time."

Animated Films:

• 9. Out of the fifteen or so named characters, only four (the number, not the character) survive.
• Played a lot in Atlantis: The Lost Empire, where numerous characters have perished onscreen, a first for a Disney animated film.
  • Kida's mother (the Queen of Atlantis) died after being fused into the Heart of Atlantis during the sinking of Atlantis that killed thousands of people who were trapped outside the crystal barrier.
  • Milo stated that his parents died of unknown causes when he was a young boy, and he was taken in by his grandfather Thaddeus, who later died of a broken heart after being ridiculed and jeered by the Smithsonian Board for his claims about Atlantis. Even Thaddeus's old partner Preston Whitmore sympathizes over Thaddeus's loss and vows to carry on his legacy, which was the main reason why he was willing to help Milo prove the existence of Atlantis.
  • The case can be said during the expedition, when almost all of the crewmembers were killed after the Leviathan destroyed the Ulysses, with the exception of the main characters and several dozens who escaped on an escape pod and subpod, and Rourke stated out that there were 200 people on board. Of course, they weren't the only ones who perished by the Leviathan's wrath as numerous sunken ships were seen surrounding the Leviathan's resting grounds, along with underground murals showing people from other civilizations perishing during their attempts to invade Atlantis. This implies that many people throughout the ages have died searching and trying to pillage Atlantis; this was shown in a deleted scene when a group of Vikings tried to search for Atlantis in their ship, only to end up being killed by the Leviathan itself.
  • During the fireflies' attack, two of the explorers' trucks exploded, killing the two poor drivers in the process.
  • The most tragic case is for Kida's father King Kashekim Nedakh, who was brutally punched in the chest by Rourke and suffered internal bleeding. He eventually succumbed to his injuries, but not before he passed his crystal to Milo so that he can stop Rourke from taking away the Heart of Atlantis. Also, during his death throes, he admitted that he wanted to use the Heart of Atlantis as a weapon of war, but his arrogance is what led his empire to crumble during the tidal wave that cost thousands of his people's lives (including his wife), an act that left him wracked with complete remorse; he even refused to be cured with his crystal's healing energy as he is more concerned about the well-being of Kida and their remaining people.
  • During the battle inside the volcano, Milo, the crew and Atlanteans suffered few casualties as several Atlantean warriors were killed by Rourke's men using gunfire. However, the tides were turned when the heroes used the powers of the fish-mobiles to kill all of Rourke's men, one-by-one. And after sending Helga to fall to her death, Rourke ends up being crystallized by Milo and shredded to pieces by his blimp's propellers.
• A Show Within a Show example in A Bug's Life in form of the junior ants. First, they make a painting of the good warrior bugs and bad grasshoppers battling, and they painted one of the good guys dead because their teacher said it would be more realistic that way. Then, they perform a play of the battle, in which apparently, EVERYONE dies.
• In Epic (2013) The Leafmen's queen dies, Mandrake's son dies, a Boggan is seen falling down onto a car windshield and is just wiped off like a swatted fly, and who knows how many more sacrificed their lives in this battle.
• In Felidae, it doesn't matter if a character the Big Bad, The Dragon, a pregnant cat or the most sympathetic character in the film. Anyone is vulnerable.
• Discussed in The Incredibles, when Helen reminds her children that this is not a cartoon and Syndrome's men will kill them without hesitation, given a chance. Although only one major character dies (Syndrome), the rest of the film racks up a high enough body count in minor characters. Syndrome is revealed to have killed at least dozens of supers offscreen, the number of evil henchmen whose deaths the heroes cause is well into the double digits, and Edna Mode even has a montage (which is Played for Laughs) entirely devoted to supers who died in the line of duty, some of them in very unpleasant ways. And that's not even counting the people who can be assumed to have died in the Omnidroid's rampage through the city.
• Justice League Dark: Apokolips War: Most of the heroes are killed off in the opening, and many more fall over the course of the movie itself two years later. The survivors at the end can be counted with both hands, and even fewer are left (physically) unmarred.
• Transformers: The Movie (1986) was famous principally for introducing this phenomenon to millions of Saturday-morning TV fans, when Optimus Prime dies, along with Megatron (the latter of which is reformatted as Galvatron), Starscream, almost all the Autobots and an entire planet of Red Shirts in the first ten minutes, followed by the on-screen maiming of several more robots including the last survivor of aforementioned planet for good measure.
• Vuk the Little Fox: The beginning of this children's cartoon seems to imply that it will be something cuddly and cute. Besides maintaining a level of cuteness, over a dozen characters (including those with names, personalities and spoken lines) die, either killed by other animals or by human hunters. There is no Carnivore Confusion, or at least the main characters don't feel confused, as the main hero kills and eats equally sapient prey on-screen without any trouble.
• The entire message of Watership Down being "Small Furry Animals Will Eventually Die Anyway, so get used to it," so it includes all variants of on-screen cute rabbit death in order to drive home the message. It was felt that too many rabbits actually survived the book (Show, Don't Tell!) due to author's reluctance to pull the trigger. So additional doomed characters are introduced and a particularly sympathetic Woobie who played a big part in the novel is highlighted in order to be gruesomely killed off near the climax.

Live-Action Films:

• Against the Wall: By the end of the film, half the cast is killed or has their fates left ambiguous, with only a few explicitly surviving.
• Alien:
  • Alien. The characters died in more or less reverse order of how famous the actors playing them were. Famous in 1979, that is. John Hurt was hugely famous and popular in the US and Britain. Even Veronica Cartwright, whose career went back to playing Violet Rutherford on Leave It to Beaver, and had intersected with Audrey Hepburn and Alfred Hitchcock, was familiar to audiences. Sigourney Weaver was entirely unknown, and the only entirely unknown actor in the cast, with just four minor credits. The deaths of the characters felt like a downward spiral, and Ripley's demise seemed inevitable. The tension of the last ten minutes (with the ship's computer voice counting them off) was almost unbearable. Ripley's survival was shocking, and until the end credits rolled, the audience still expected the alien to pop up somewhere.
    • In fact the original script DID have the alien kill Ripley, then do the log entry in her voice. The producers nixed this idea, a case of Executive Meddling done right.
  • Aliens. Practically everyone dies, most in the initial catastrophic engagement with the aliens. Of the sixteen characters on LV-426, only four make it to the end credits, and two of them are seriously injured (one of whom, an android, is in bits).
  • Alien³. The survivors of the previous film, after fighting through all of Aliens and surviving, all die right in the beginning, except for Ripley. The prisoners are all killed one by one, with a lot of them completely unexpected. Clemens, the only sympathetic and interesting character in the film is among them. Ripley herself even dies at the end.
• Most of the main characters get killed by the end of Apocalypse Now in increasingly more brutal ways. First Clean gets shot and dies instantly, then Chief gets impaled by a spear, and finally Chef gets decapitated (judging from the expression on his face he was probably alive when they cut off his head).
• Avengers: Infinity War has a massive body count to it, with several characters dying over the course of the film. In order: Thanos kills Heimdall and then Loki, Gamora is thrown to her death by Thanos to procure the Soul Stone, Thanos rips the Mind Stone out of Vision's head and kills him, then finally, Thanos uses the power of all six Infinity Stones to exterminate half of all life in the universe. Among those lost when Thanos's plan comes to fruition are the Winter Soldier, Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, Falcon, Groot, Mantis, Drax, Star-Lord, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Maria Hill, and Nick Fury. Among the casualties of the Snap retroactively confirmed in later movies or by the directors are Hope van Dyne/Wasp, Hank Pym, Janet van Dyne (these three in the mid-credits scene of Ant-Man and the Wasp), Betty Ross, Lady Sif, Laura Barton and her three children, Sharon Carter, Erik Selvig, Shuri, May Parker, Ned Leeds, Michelle Jones, Flash Thompson, Betty Brant, Jason Ionello, and the "Galaga Guy" from The Avengers (2012).
• Avengers: Endgame doesn't have as many deaths as Infinity War, but it's made clear beyond all doubt that the few characters that do die have no chance whatsoever of being resurrected. The two major character deaths are Black Widow, who sacrifices herself to retrieve the Soul Stone, and Iron Man — the main character of the franchise — who succumbs to injuries caused by using the Infinity Stones to defeat Thanos and his army. Meanwhile, everyone who died in Infinity War outside of the snap remains dead, with the Hulk even clarifying that he tried to bring back Natasha but it proved impossible.
• The Baker Street Dozen: Loyal government agents and helpful associates of clients aren't safe. Neither is Kitty, the female lead in The Voice of Terror or teenaged ingenue Marie in The Scarlet Claw.
• By the end of Balibo, everyone is dead except for José and Juliana.
• Blade: Trinity starts with Whistler's death, who has been around for both previous films. Then again, he was thought to have committed suicide at the end of the first film.
• Only two of the eponymous bodyguards gathered to protect Sun Yat Sen in Bodyguards and Assassins are still alive by the time that he leaves Hong Kong (roughly two hours after arriving).
• Rocco and Il Duche from The Boondock Saints and The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, as well as some secondary characters.
• In The Bourne Series, main characters drop like flies, providing real tension in the third film as Nicky flees from the CIA assassin following her. Compare with the novel series.
• Australian movie BoyTown has all the main characters die in a plane crash towards the end (although this is entirely Played for Laughs).
• This is actually a plot point in The Cabin in the Woods: save for the Final Girl Dana (whose death is optional), all five of the group of friends heading into the woods must die in accordance with horror movie tropes, as that is necessary for the Ancient Ones to be appeased by the Human Sacrifice. Then, things go horribly wrong, and by the end all of the Controllers are dead as well — and then the Ancient Ones, angry over the lack of a proper sacrifice, rise to destroy humanity.
• Neil Marshall's Centurion ends with only one major character alive. All the Centurion soldiers are dead except Quintus, and the only other people alive are the Pict leader Gorlacon, the exile Arianne, and the governor. The three of them have less than 10 minutes of screen time.
• By the end of Children of Men everyone is dead except Kee and her baby.
• In City of Angels Meg Ryan's character, one of the two leads in the film, dies at the end.
• The 2010 Clash of the Titans remake wastes no time in killing off characters, both major and minor. Both Perseus' and Andromeda's parents, the cult leader who tried to sacrifice her, the entire Praetorian guard and its captain Draco, the Jinn who accompanied Perseus on his journey, and Io all face their demise along the course of the film. However, Io got better by the end and is reunited with Perseus. Hades doesn't count, since he was merely sent back to the underworld.
• Cloud Atlas: And thanks to the shared cast, some of them arguably die multiple times.
• Contagion (2011): Everyone besides Mitch Emhoff, the only person with real immunity, who gets truly infected dies.
• The Cowboys. First, one of the plucky youngsters goes, then at the end of the second act, John freakin' Wayne dies.
• Every film in the Cube series is like this, in typical thriller fashion. The original Cube, Cube 2: Hypercube, and Cube Zero.
• Daylight's End: Out of the twenty-one named human characters, only Rourke, Sam, Vince, Chris's wife and stepson, Harker's daughter, the half-insane Annabelle, and maybe but probably not Bishop and Frank survive to the end.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Zack Snyder's Justice League: The "Knightmare" timeline has a high body count, including Lois Lane, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Vulko, Harley Quinn, Kilowog, and even Batman as confirmed casualties, and presumably several other named characters dead. However, if Joker's speculation is of any indication, along with Mera indicating that Superman killed Aquaman (when we previously saw Darkseid stabbing him in an earlier vision), there may be multiple iterations of this timeline, and not all characters are necessarily doomed.
  • The Suicide Squad: Not even an hour into the movie, and all the members of Task Force X's A-team (minus Harley Quinn and Rick Flag) and President Silvio Luna, the supposed Big Bad, are all unceremoniously axed. Later in the film, The Thinker, Rick Flag, Peacemaker, the Polka-Dot Man, and Starro the Conqueror are added to the casualty list. However, the post-credits scenes show that Weasel and Peacemaker ultimately survived.
• Deep Blue Sea. Literally moments after establishing himself as the leader of the group with an amazing speech, Samuel L. Jackson's character gets sharked to pieces. And despite the usual male and female love interest making it to the end, Susan McCallister cuts her arm and jumps into the water to distract the shark. You can't help thinking she's going to be all right, right before she's chomped, torn in two and swallowed. R.I.P. Sacrificial Lion.
• Of the large cast of characters in Demon Knight by the end of the movie Jeryline is the only survivor.
• As the name suggests, The Departed is filled with death, and has a startling abundance of X's to go along with that theme.
• About halfway through Drive (2011) starts playing this trope pretty hard until the end when all but two named characters are dead.
• The Hong Kong Kung Fu flick Duel to the Death is a film about a duel between the best swordsmen in China and Japan for bragging rights between the two nations. By the end everyone is dead except for the two leads, and both of them are strongly implied to be dying from wounds suffered in the duel as the credits roll. (Actually there is one other character who is still alive... it's just that he has undergone a Break the Haughty experience and possibly gone insane as well.)
• Only two named characters and a small amount of unimportant minor characters live to the end of Edge of Darkness (2010), and one of the two characters was put in a coma she probably didn't get out of.
• Feast dines heartily on this trope. In the opening scene, a badass protagonist bursts into the restaurant, proclaims himself the hero, is designated as such by the movie itself, and is then viciously dispatched. For the rest of the film you're never quite sure who'll survive and who won't because even the kid is swallowed whole.
• The Fighting Seabees: Several of Donovan's most prominent subordinates die. Donovan himself is no luckier.
• The Final Destination movies. NOBODY EVER LIVES! Alex Browning and Clear Rivers survive the first one, but it's revealed that Alex was killed by a piece of falling masonry between films, and Clear is killed in a gas explosion near the end of the second one. Kimberly Corman and Thomas Burke survive the second one and are revealed to have died by falling into a woodchipper in the alternate ending end of the third film. The franchise has a 0 survivor rate.
• Fortress (2012), a low-budget but well-executed movie about a B-17 crew in North Africa in 1943, kills three members of the crew in the first five minutes. They all get New Meat replacements, who fly with the crew for several missions. Then a major air strike on Rome costs the lives of several guys you thought were safely encased in Plot Armor.
• From Dusk Till Dawn showcased this in the second half. Its sequels followed suit.
• Go For Broke! has a huge speaking-character death count by the end of the film, which unfortunately reflects the real casualty rate of the Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion: 9,486 Purple Hearts divided by 3,000 troops. Sadly, this is mainly due to them being treated as cannon fodder.
• The Great Escape fills this trope. Only three of the characters escaped and everybody else involved bar a few get killed. Essentially, this was Truth in Television since the movie was Based on a True Story.
• Green Room: Three of the four band members don't make it. The Skinheads aren't so lucky either, with Gabe and Werm being the only ones alive at the end.
• The Ice Harvest: Charlie and Pete are the only main characters to survive.
• The James Bond series generally averts this, as although some of Bond's significant allies can be killed, usually the MI6 regulars and main Bond Girls are safe.
  • However, it's definitely played straight in the Daniel Craig era, with the deaths of Vesper Lynd, René Mathis, M, Felix Leiter, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and even Bond himself! Making this extra shocking is the fact that apart from Vesper and Blofeld, none of these characters were ever killed in the original novels.
• In Ju-on, and its remake series The Grudge, anyone can be killed by the ghosts at any moment. Even the ghost's beloved crush from her college days is no exception.
  • The only characters not killed by Kayako (in the Ju-on series, at least) is her crush's wife and unborn son; they were killed by Kayako's deranged husband.
• John Woo's The Killer ends with just about every major character dead except for Jenny (who is blind for good) and Inspector Li Ying (who was arrested by his fellow officers for killing Wong Hoi right in front of them).
• In Last of the Mohicans (1992), all the main characters die except the romantic leads and the eponymous character.
• As seen in Legend of Eight Samurai and Battle Royale, Kinji Fukasaku lived by this trope.
• George Romero's Living Dead Series is this trope in full force. In the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), none of the main cast survive the movie. The rest of the series follows suit — while some of the main cast of each movie make it to the end, you have no way of anticipating who. Even the remakes run on this.
• Meet the Feebles, as it progresses, continues to find new ways to kill off the cast, who usually all have it coming in some capacity. By the end of the film, only seven of the Feebles are alive.
• In A Nightmare on Elm Street. It becomes evident further in the franchise that we aren't sure who lives and who dies. Whilst some may survive a movie, like Nancy, Kristen, Kincaid, Joey and Don (Nancy's father) they don't survive the next one they feature in, whilst others simply don't even live through one. Although, Alice managed to feature in two films, even surviving by the end of her second one. Part of this reason is that we can easily be tricked into thinking an established main character will live in regards to Plot Armor, so the fact that this trope is played with is clues to the awareness of a growing peril of the situation as characters are constantly picked off. If a few of the main characters survive a film, it's justified in regards to their integral role in the plot.
• No Country for Old Men: no character was safe — even Anton Chigurh. And the movie lets you know it.
• Paranormal Activity is an interesting case. The series has a tendency of killing off most (if not all) of the main characters, but spares the minor characters who show up in three scenes or less. Four movies in all, and the only main character still confirmed alive and not possessed by the demon is Ali.
• Penn & Teller Get Killed lampshades this with the title and Penn & Teller do indeed get killed.
• Practically everyone except Mathilda and Tony is dead by the end of The Professional: The Hero (Leon), the Big Bad (Stansfield), most of the Big Bad's goons and the entirety of Mathilda's family (including her four-year-old brother).
• In Psycho, the death of Marion Crane was nearly as shocking and unexpected as the Twist Ending. Naturally, these aren't secrets anymore.
• In Red State, almost all the main characters die quickly and suddenly at various intervals in the plot. It has has characters played by big stars that die incredibly early on and have little screen time.
• The Resident Evil Film Series is just as bad as the video games. By the end of Resident Evil: Extinction, the only important characters still alive are Alice, Claire, and Wesker. And then Wesker died at the end of Afterlife. He got better somehow, but still. He's finally put down for good in The Final Chapter.
• Unsurprisingly, as Salvador is set during The Salvadoran Civil War, a bloody civil conflict that took the lives of an enormous amount of innocent people, over the course of the film many characters die, usually being horribly murdered.
• Saving Private Ryan. The first major scene in the movie establishes the tone pretty well, if the fact that's a war movie didn't tip you off first. Most of those who die in the opening barrage are unknown to to the audience. The later battle at the radar site, and over the village account for characters they've come to know.
• Saw: Eight movies in total, and the only recurring character to survive to the end of it all is Lawrence Gordon, who only appeared in the first and last ones.
• Scream: Any character regardless of the actor in the role can (and does) die in the first ten minutes. This is also referenced in Scream 3 by resident horror movie buff Randy: In the third movie, all bets are off and anyone can die. True to form the film proves this by killing off Cotton Weary, a major character from the first two, right off the bat.
  • And Randy himself in Scream 2, unexpectedly and right in the middle of the movie, dropping a bridge on him.
  • Drew Barrymore was killed in the first 5 minutes of Scream (1996) to make this point. She was a popular actress, so killing her off so quickly was unexpected.
• Serenity (2005): Sudden deaths instill this trope in the second act of the movie, and it runs to the end.
• In Seven Samurai, only three of the titular seven make it to the end; the other four all die in combat. The American remake, The Magnificent Seven (1960), also had only three of its main characters survive, but they are not all the counterparts of the characters who survived in the Japanese film.
• The films of Guy Ritchie, his Sherlock Holmes movies aside.
• Shin Godzilla isn't shy about its nature of being Darker and Edgier than normal for usual Godzilla fare, a family is shown dying when Godzilla first comes on land, and the Prime Minister and most of the Cabinet die when Godzilla unleashes his Atomic Breath on Tokyo following being injured by bunker busters.
• Only five characters live to the end of Smokin' Aces.
• Its prequel, Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball, is even worse. It introduces several new characters who don't appear or were even mentioned in the original film (except Lester Tremor and Lazlo Soot, obviously). Besides those two, only two characters survive the bloodbath in the film.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek (2009): The planet Vulcan, including Spock's mother, Amanda Grayson, who may be a more appropriate example for this page. Especially shocking due to the finger it gave to Status Quo Is God: you thought it would be your standard Prequel and then they go and do that.
  • It similarly destroyed Romulus and Remus — the twin planets at the heart of the Romulan Star Empire, in the prime universe to get the plot started in the first place.
  • Star Trek: Generations: While it doesn't feature a ton of main character deaths — the TNG cast comes out intact — the universe does lose the recurring villains Lursa and B'etor, and oh, by the way, James T. Kirk.
  • Star Trek: Nemesis, as the final TNG movie, ups the ante by killing off Data in its climax. The movie had the feel from early on that someone was going to die but the who ended up rather surprising, with most of the foreshadowing and suspense being pinned on another party.
• Star Wars is a sneaky example, because it doesn't feel like one. But if you look closely at all the episodes of the Skywalker Saga, you'll see there's no category of characters that's completely safe, save maybe comedic sidekicks. In the original trilogy (IV-VI), you can say that main characters are safe as long as they're not the mentor. But if you start with the prequel trilogy (I-III), you'll see basically all the main characters from there die on-screen, some making it as far as the original trilogy first but with Qui-Gon Jinn (again the mentor) starting it off in episode I. Also, with episode VII, we see that the main characters from the original trilogy aren't safe either, as Han Solo becomes yet another victim of Mentor Occupational Hazard. Now, it might be claimed that it tends to be the older, more experienced characters specifically who are affected by this, either ones who were so to begin with (Qui-Gon Jinn, Mace Windu, Yoda) or ones who'd become the older generation by the time they died (Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, and Han Solo). It's true that the protagonists of the current younger generation have been the least likely to die, almost to the point that you can trust it won't happen, but Padmé Amidala's fate in episode III shows that's not impossible either.
  • Rogue One: Every named character that isn't Saved by Canon is killed during their mission, including the film's protagonist. This is due to the movie being more warlike in nature.
  • The Last Jedi proves that Rogue One was not a fluke or one-off when it comes to killing characters, as Admiral Ackbar, Supreme Leader Snoke, Vice-Admiral Holdo, Captain Phasma, and finally Luke Skywalker are all dead by the time the movie ends.
  • Solo carries on this newly established tradition by killing off quite a few major characters in unexpected ways, showing that even a Lighter and Softer Lower-Deck Episode doesn't mean anyone is safe. Of the newly introduced characters, Rio Durant, Val, L3-37, Dryden Vos, and Tobias Beckett all die — the only major characters not Saved by Canon who survive are Qi'ra and Enfys Nest.
• Street Kings should've been named Dead Star Walking: The Movie. Every single character played by a well-known actor (excluding Keanu Reeves and Hugh Laurie) dies. Every. Single. One.
• Supposedly the whole point of Sucker Punch, leaving none but one protagonist, one anti-hero, and the antagonists alive in a massive Downer Ending.
  • Subverted though, since Word of God stated that the characters who died only died in Babydoll's imagination, not in reality.
• Sunshine: Once Kaneda died, everyone knew this was coming.
• Dario Argento's films seem to be rather fond of this, killing most of the main cast and rarely ever having a survival count higher than 2. The most egregious example of this being Suspiria (1977), where once the main heroine kills the head witch (Suspirorum, the Mother of Sighs), the building starts to collapse, and the moment she leaves, it bursts into flames, supposedly killing every single person within the building except for the main heroine (thankfully, the students were watching a play in the theatre, so they weren't there).
• Quentin Tarantino is clearly a fan of this trope.
  • All but one character dies in Reservoir Dogs
  • Before killing the titular Bill, nearly every other character in Kill Bill is killed either by The Bride herself, or by a different member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad.
  • The most shaggy-dog extreme of this trope is the film Death Proof, the whole first half of which is spent following characters who don't survive into the second half, just to establish this trope for the film. It then makes up for it with one of the best car chases ever put on film.
  • Inglourious Basterds: Not even Hitler survives this film. About half the cast is killed in a tavern shootout. The ones who survive that are blown to bits in the climactic theater explosion (or various shootouts and stranglings taking place moments before). Only three of a twenty-member ensemble cast make it to the end, and one is a fairly minor character who has maybe ten lines tops.
  • Django Unchained. Once Calvin Candie and Dr. King Schultz were killed within the span of twenty seconds, it was apparent that the Grim Reaper was hovering directly over the rest of the characters' heads.
  • The Hateful Eight: In true Tarantino fashion, only two of the main characters survive to see the credits roll, but due to their heavy wounds and isolated location, it's doubtful they'll last much longer.
• The Thin Red Line, the film even more so than the book.
• By the end of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), only two characters are left alive, and they are most likely to freeze to death.
  • Given the nature of the titular Thing, there's a good chance that one of them is already dead.
• Truth or Consequences, N.M. kills off a huge chunk of its cast, especially during the last act. Only three major characters live in the end, and only one of those three was a member of the original gang from the start of the film.
• Volhynia. No one can feel safe, and everyone, regardless of age and gender, can die in a very brutal way. Foregone Conclusion given the historical events it was based on.
• By the time the credits roll on War for the Planet of the Apes, only five characters with names and personalities are left in Caesar's tribe of apes: Maurice, Rocket, Bad Ape, Nova, and Cornelius. Everyone else is dead, including Caesar.
• In the real life Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington's officer corps and aides were devastated by the battle, with a large number of them either being killed or wounded. This carries over to the movie Waterloo. Also, all those Mauve Shirts who humanize the encounter and both armies? Don't hold out too much hope for them either.

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