NOTE: Since this trope reveals a villain being responsible for other events in the series (potentially even after their own demise), expect spoilers.
Villainous Legacies in Live-Action Films.
- Alien: Assuming Prometheus is in continuity with the rest of the franchise, the Engineer race serves as this, having created the Xenomorphs to begin with.
- Daryll Lee Callum is this in Copycat. Peter Foley, the actual copycat of the title, is a fan of serial killer Callum who is committing his killings in an attempt to impress the imprisoned Callum.
- In The Dark Knight Trilogy, Ra's al Ghul, The Leader of the League of Shadows, is killed after he tries to annihilate Gotham and all its citizens to rid the world of its corruption. In The Dark Knight Rises his influence continues to be felt since the League was not actually destroyed, and Ra's student Bane sets out to fulfill his dead master's plans along with Ra's daughter Talia al Ghul, but wants Gotham to suffer first.
- Friday the 13th:
- Many massacres committed by Jason Voorhees stem from the death of his mother, the Big Bad of the original 1980 film.
- After Jason was (temporarily) Killed Off for Real in The Final Chapter, he was supposed to create a legacy as well in the form of copycat killers. However, intense negative reception to this idea led to Jason himself being brought Back from the Dead to reclaim the position of main series antagonist instead.
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies: Smaug is dead after the film's opening, but his attack on Lake-town leaves the town completely destroyed, and drives the survivors to seek refuge in the City of Dale. The Dragon Sickness Smaug's presence left on Erebor's treasure partly fuels Thorin's descent into madness even after Smaug has died, which in turn debatably influences the progression of the Battle of the Five Armies.
- Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: The Indominus rex's death at the jaws of the ''Mosasaurus'' in the previous film is confirmed in the opening of Fallen Kingdom, where her skeleton is discovered at the bottom of the Mosasaurus enclosure by a submersible. The bioweapon program that created her, however, deemed her enough of a success to move on to the next stage — the Indoraptor — and they collect one of the Indominus' ribs to create it.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- In spite of the Red Skull no longer being around, HYDRA have continued to be a major threat to the world as whole- his second-in-command simply rebuilt the organization within S.H.I.E.L.D. and it's never entirely disappeared since- Every time its leaders are killed or imprisoned, a new one takes their place, as per their motto.
- Loki is the reason the Avengers, the team of Earth's mightiest heroes, was initially created. His actions in Thor and The Avengers helped motivate S.H.I.E.L.D. to go to more extreme measures to protect humanity in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He also set the stage for the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron by bringing the Chitauri scepter containing the Mind Stone to Earth, where it was eventually used to create Ultron and Vision.
- Outside of the Avengers, Loki's actions had lasting effects on the people of New York, with Adrian Toomes in Spider-Man: Homecoming and Hammer Industries in Luke Cage creating weapons out of those left behind in the battle, and his attack on New York allowing people such as Wilson Fisk in Daredevil to take advantage of the situation and rise in power.
- Zemo's villainous actions in Captain America: Civil War are a result of Ultron's attack on Sokovia killing his wife, son, and father. As a result, Ultron posthumously achieved his goal of breaking the Avengers apart, albeit in a roundabout way.
- Also, Crossbones' suicide bombing was the straw that broke the camel's back in regards of the Avengers being Destructive Saviours and caused the Sokovia Accords to be implemented. The gauntlets he used to fight Captain America in Lagos were salvaged by Adrian Toomes' clean-up company/criminal group in Spider-Man: Homecoming and subsequently retrofitted with air-blast tech, becoming the primary weapons of Jackson Brice and Herman Schultz, aka The Shocker.
- After being the Big Bad of Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos gets quickly ambushed and killed by the surviving Avengers by the beginning of Avengers: Endgame. However, because he destroyed the Infinity Stones before meeting his end, the Avengers have no way of being able to undo the snap that turned half the universe to dust, leaving them to pick up the shattered pieces for five years until Ant-Man discovered a method to Time Travel to the past in order to retrieve the Infinity Stones and reverse the snap. This in turn attracts the attention of Past Thanos who decides to Time Travel into the future in order to continue what his future self started.
- Mysterio may have been killed at the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home, but in one of his recordings, he manages to not only expose Spider-Man as Peter Parker to the entire world, but also framed him as his murderer using Manipulative Editing, thus ruining his reputation. Peter, fed up with how the world treats him and his loved ones as a result of the fallout, goes to Strange to erase his public identity... causing the catastrophic multiversal events of Spider-Man: No Way Home that ultimately led to Peter being alone and forgotten from the rest of the world.
- MonsterVerse:
- The MUTO pair which rampaged across the Pacific in Godzilla (2014) are directly responsible for The Unmasqued World in all MonsterVerse instalments set afterwards. In the Godzilla Aftershock graphic novel, set shortly after the events of the 2014 film, Monarch's research on the MUTO pair's communication and nesting habits contributes majorly to them forming an understanding of the MUTO Prime which Godzilla is pursuing around the world.
- After King Ghidorah is defeated and his Apocalypse How stopped in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), what actions he managed to commit beforehand overall had some surprisingly positive effects. The end credits indicate any lasting environmental damage from his global Titan-rampage is being cleaned up by the Titans; but humanity's global cities have suffered untold devastation. Ironically, Ghidorah's actions have aided the planet in the long run due to the Titans he awakened having a positive environmental effect after his death. While Ghidorah failed to make Earth his own hostile world or kill all life on it, he did succeed in making Earth a world of monsters. On the downside,Godzilla vs. Kong reveals that Ghidorah's surviving severed head is being used by Apex Cybernetics to create Mechagodzilla, and Ghidorah's influence is directly responsible for the mech going rogue.
- Both Ghidorah and Camazotz respectively have a negative Villainous Legacy involvement in the destruction of Skull Island before the main time frame of Godzilla vs. Kong. The Kingdom Kong graphic novel reveals that Ghidorah left a Perpetual Superstorm over the Pacific Ocean which didn't dissipate, and two years after Ghidorah's downfall, this superstorm is drawn by Camazotz' influence away from its original position and into Skull Island's storm barrier, enveloping the island itself in a perpetual storm. Although Kong defeats Camazotz, the alterations Camazotz caused to Skull Island's climate using Ghidorah's storm are permanent. As a result, in Godzilla vs. Kong, the Iwi minus Jia have been wiped out and Skull Island's ecosystem is invariaby dying, forcing Monarch to find a new home for Kong.
- Pan's Labyrinth: Captain Vidal, surrounded by rebels realizes that he would soon be killed. He hands his son over to Mercedes and calmly requests that the child will be told of his exploits. Mercedes cuts him off and says, "No. He won't even know your name." It is the only time in the film he seems genuinely sad about something.
- In the Saw series, Jigsaw is killed in Saw III, but the series is continued by his apprentices and the plans he's left for them to follow. In the aforementioned movie, he's genuinely disappointed that one of them (Amanda Young) turned out to be a Misanthrope Supreme who didn't even bother with his philosophy, and built part of the plot around the consequences for her lack of mercy.
- Spiral shows that, years after the presumed downfall of all of his apprentices, Jigsaw managed to inspire even more successors without having personally trained them, as the movie's titular copycat killer adapts his techniques to fulfill his own mission and agenda.
- Ghostface has been played by thirteen different people (not counting his voice actor) throughout all six films of the Scream series. There's enough of them that several Ghostface killers have their own separate legacies:
- The Ghostface from the original film, Billy Loomis, inspired a killer in the second movie to take revenge for his death, and shows up in the new trilogy to menace the protagonist, Sam Carpenter. He's her father, and keeps appearing to her in hallucinations to encourage her to kill.
- The Ghostface from Scream 3, Roman Bridger, was the first Ghostface in the films' timeline (and The Man Behind the Man for the first movie). He was killed off after his reveal, but his actions inspired copycats in both the second and fourth movies, and the horror film series he inspired drove the Ghostfaces in the fifth movie to murder.
- The Ghostface from Scream (2022), Richie Kirsch, inspired Jason Carvey and his accomplice Greg to continue on with his "movie" after his death. Though they didn't last long, the other killers in the sixth movie are driven by the need to avenge his death, since they're his father, brother and sister.
- Spider-Man Trilogy: Norman Osborn, posthumously. Although he dies at the end of the first film, his death haunts Harry throughout the rest of the trilogy and motivates him to take revenge on Spider-Man. By the third movie, Harry becomes the New Goblin.
- Star Trek: Despite dying at the end of the second film, Khan's thirst for revenge and his detonation of the Genesis Device directly influences the next two movies, and the last two as well if Kirk's demotion from admiral to captain is included.
- Star Wars:
- The Order of the Sith Lords, from the end of the New Sith Wars to the Galactic Civil War a thousand years later, practiced what's known as the Rule of Two which meant that at any given point in the history of the Republic, the order was comprised of two, and only two, Sith warriors: a master and an apprentice. The apprentice becomes the master once their former master has died (often killed by them, no less) and they have an apprentice of their own to continue the cycle. Of course, many Sith Lords have disobeyed this practice. Darth Sidious, for instance, established his "Rule of One" where he'll secretly harbor many apprentices all at once to do his bidding while he was the sole person in power, and many apprentices (including Sidious' last one, Vader) secretly kept apprentices of their own.
- The Force Awakens takes place 32 years after Return of the Jedi, but we see the First Order carrying an almost cult-like devotion to both Emperor Palpatine and his Galactic Empire. Kylo Ren, in particular, literally worships his grandfather Darth Vader's image, as he keeps his cremated helmet on display in his quarters and vows to "finish what [he] started", specifically the extermination of the Jedi Knights, namely his uncle and former master Luke Skywalker. What makes this example especially sad is that Vader's last action was to perform a Heel–Face Turn and embrace Redemption Equals Death. It gets even more sadder when it's revealed Palpatine wasn't even dead to begin with and had his soul inside a decaying clone body on Exegol in the event that Anakin would kill him and impersonated his grandson's idol from light years away.
