Film franchises with their own pages
- In Blue Thunder, protagonist Frank Murphy is a police helicopter pilot, and he naturally goes to some lengths not to kill anyone (except the Big Bad) even while they're trying to shoot him out of the sky. This despite being in command of a heavily armored Black Helicopter armed with a 20-mm rotary cannon, which has an uncanny ability to blow away cars, choppers, and aircraft without harming the people inside.
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch Cassidy, the tough, notorious, wildly-successful, train-looting, bank-robbing, gun-waving, badass outlaw, when faced with the prospect of a shootout, lamely admits to the Sundance Kid that he had never killed a man in his life. It's almost painful to hear Butch pleading with the bandits to go away so that he won't have to defend himself.
- Ironically, this is just after the two of them have quit their criminal lives for a legit job.
- Subverted in a rather surprisingly brutal way in the movie Darkman. The protagonist has caught the bad guy from falling to his doom by the pantleg. The bad guys starts into a typical "You can't kill me, you're the good guy..." speech, and unwisely ends it with the line "you couldn't live with yourself." The protagonist, who by this point has been burned beyond recognition, left for dead, surgically altered, and has already killed every one of his hired thugs (which he knew about!) promptly lets go of the bad guy, letting him fall to his death, replying "I've had to learn to live with a lot of things."
- Played for Hypocritical Humor in District 9. As Christopher and Wikus are breaking into MNU headquarters, a guard opens fire on them and Wikus's instinctive response is to splatter the guard all over the wall with his alien weaponry.Christopher: I thought you said not to kill them?
Wikus: He shot at me! - Recited verbatim by Brother Gilbert in Dragonheart before deciding to kill the evil king Einon. Einon survives the attack however.
- Both Dumbledore and Newt Scamander from Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them are two of the few heroes in the franchise who don't kill any dark wizards despite having the power to do so, Newt even shows mercy to Grindlewald when he manages to capture him (despite Grindlewald being basically wizard Hitler). Ironically Harry himself averts this, having slayed the Basilisk in the second movie and in the seveneth movie stunned a few Death Eaters on broomsticks making them (as he points out in the book) fall hundreds of stories to their deaths.
- Powerfully done in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey as Bilbo while invisible has Gollum at his mercy and about to slit his throat, which in some ways would be the merciful thing to do, but Bilbo instead spares him and jumps over his head to freedom. Like Gandalf says in The Fellowship of the Ring when Frodo claims "it was a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance", it was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand, not to kill without need and at an unfair advantage. It's also one of the very few times anyone has ever used the One Ring in a positive fashion.
- In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Mothra is the only Titan shown onscreen who never once tries to kill a human— even when they directly attack her, she just traps them in her webbing. Of course, she is willing to help Godzilla kill Ghidorah, but his Omnicidal Maniac nature paints him as a reasonable exception.
- In Hot Fuzz, Nicholas Angel aims for incapacitating shots in the final shootout. Despite the several gory murders before, the final shootout sees no deaths.
- Angel's shooting skills were purposely laid out as a Chekhov's Skill early in the film, so it's justified. Danny, on the other hand...
- Tom Weaver does seem to die in the end, but even that happens by accident and not directly by Angel.
- As in the original series, The Lone Ranger wants the justice system to deal with the villains rather than take revenge himself, and enforces this trope on Tonto, despite the fact Tonto wants vengeance on Cavendish and Cole. In the end, Tonto passes up killing Cole... but has no qualms about leaving Cole to his Karmic Death.
- In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Aragon makes sure Evil Chancellor Grima Wormtongue is spared when the recently uncursed King Theodan is out for his blood, as The Good King Aragon believes human life not matter how lowly and despicable should be shown in mercy compared to the true forces of evil. In the extended edition Aragon even offers a kindly hand to Wormtoungue — who spits on it in reponse. In book Theodan was the one who invoked Thou Shall Not Kill despite the many reasons to slay Grima, him creeping on his niece Éowyn being just one, although Theodan it makes clear if he meets Grima on the battlefield there'd be no mercy then.
- Subverted in Mystery Men. The Bowler, a woman whose bowling ball has her father's spirit within, confronts her father's killer. He taunts her, saying that she doesn't have the nerve to take her revenge. He is right; she's a hero and as such above that. Her father, however, is dead and pretty pissed about it and is something of a prick, so he really has no problem killing the guy.
- But played perfectly straight with Dr. Heller — which makes the heroes reject his help, until he shows them how effective his inventions can be.
- In Star Wars, the Jedi have compassion for all living things, and so they extremely dislike having to kill someone or something. However, they realize that it is sometimes necessary. This view gets slowly degraded during the Clone Wars.
- In the Terminator series, John Connor orders the T-800 to not kill anybody. This carries over to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles... where both John and Sarah try to live by this, but over the course of the series are forced into taking a life each (see below).
- In the novelization and the original screenplay for Terminator 2, the Terminator is shown to be having a great deal of trouble with this. Its' original orders before traveling back in time were to destroy anyone or anything that threatened the safety of John Connor. The Terminator also had self-preservation programming that would not allow it to let any threat or attack against itself go unanswered. These scenes were left out of filming because there wasn't really any feasible way to show the Terminator experiencing internal conflict. In the film, the Terminator simply uses non-lethal but incapacitating attacks when dealing with humans, although it's very clear that it would use lethal force without hesitation if it was necessary to protect John.
- In Warriors of Virtue, the Warriors cannot kill. In fact, when Ryan arrives, he learns that their leader, Yun, is in the middle of a Heroic BSoD because he accidentally broke that code in the heat of battle. The fact that the soldier he killed was actually Elysia's brother probably didn't help his mindset much.
