Movie Characters Who Deserved More Significant Deaths

Aesthetically, Darth Maul is one of the greatest successes of the Star Wars franchise. He's got a crown of horns, facial tattoos, and a double-bladed lightsaber, which, if you don't recall, was a very new thing back in the days of The Phantom Menace. To look at him is to return to your popcorn-munching childhood, in which fannish gripes are burned away in the white-hot blaze of oh my god, look at that guy, he's so cool! Years later, that impression remains intact ... so long as you block out the memory of just how disappointingly he died.

If you need a refresher, let us oblige you. Obi-Wan Kenobi cut him in half, and he fell into a pit. Yes, okay, the fight was set to one of the most impressive songs of the prequels' soundtrack, and sure, Obi-Wan had just witnessed Maul murder Qui-Gon Jinn and was thus empowered by rage. But the sheer fact remains that Darth Maul — he of the devastatingly cool promotional photos and unprecedented weaponry — died like a schmuck in the trilogy's first movie. Though other corners of the Star Wars universe, from the comics to The Clone Wars, would go on to resurrect him and grant him the story he always deserved, the events of The Phantom Menace remain as disappointing as they've ever been.

The whole fact of Darwin's death in X-Men: First Class is itself up for debate. After all, the guy's superpower, the ability to instantly adapt his physiology, is literally not dying. That's the person the X-Men team decided to sacrifice upon the altar of "look how dangerous our bad guys are"? Really? They couldn't have dragged someone like Goldballs or Beak out of the X-vaults to serve that purpose?

But sure, let's accept the fact that Darwin dies, regardless of how flimsy its basis might be. Even if one does so, there remains the sheer lameness of how he died. Sebastian Shaw, leader of the Hellfire Club, attacks the facility in which the nascent X-Men are being held. He absorbs one of Alex Summers' energy blasts, then forces it down Darwin's throat. Darwin tries to adapt in response to the blast, but he's unable to and is incinerated from the inside. Sure, okay, one can be churlish and argue that the upper limits of Darwin's powers hadn't been defined. Perhaps this was simply too much energy to adapt to. But again, why not just choose another character to kill off with a less problematic powerset? And if it had to be Darwin, could the man with the spectacularly flexible powers truly not have done more than just turn briefly metallic before crumbling to ash? Apparently not. At least he lives on in the comics.

Finnick Odair was one of The Hungers Games' easiest characters to love. He was, of course, gorgeous, and equipped with a roguish sense of humor that garnered him fans by the thousands. Then readers learned of his tragic past and present — pimped out by the Capitol and separated from Annie Cresta, his true love — and, well, Finnick's popularity was sealed. As he grew to trust and respect Katniss, work towards the liberation of Panem, and eventually marry Annie, his place in fans' hearts only grew, to the point that his death (in a series that loved to shock and upset) became a practical certainty.

And yeah, to the surprise of very few, Finnick does indeed die in the final assault on the Capitol. After all, few characters so roundly liked are spared in this series, from Katniss' sister Primrose to her stylist, the courageous Cinna. But unlike them, Finnick dies like a background extra. As he, Katniss, Gale, and other rebels make their bloody way to Snow's mansion, Finnick is attacked in the sewers by horrific reptilian monsters, genetically engineered by the Capitol. The last we see of him is a roiling foam of water, though the books inform us that his head is bitten off. Katniss, visibly traumatized, triggers a bomb to spare him a drawn-out death before the story moves along. A reasonable choice, as war waits for no one, but still, it's a brutal one for Finnick-lovers everywhere.

There are a lot of parts in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice that left audiences unimpressed. But something about Superman's death particularly rankles, something that goes deeper than the mere stupidity of the "Martha" moment" or the general murkiness of the movie's lighting. Superman's death, for all its bang-zoom CGI and overwrought mourning, was one of the least crucial parts of the story.

For one thing, we all knew Superman wasn't going to stay dead. However, this needn't have been as glaringly bad as it was. After all, Marvel managed to wring real emotion from its deaths-by-snap, which no one believed would stick, but DC's rushed attempt at kickstarting a universe meant that whatever emotion might have been roused by Superman's death wasn't there. Then there's the fact that at the moment of death, the plot has been hopelessly snarled. Batman and Superman aren't fighting anymore, Wonder Woman has shown up, and the antagonist is now a superpowered corpse that reminds the audience of Man of Steel's controversial ending. When the deathblow comes, it's in the midst of total tonal confusion. So Superman's dead? Okay? He'll be back anyway, you figure, and you're really just sitting there in your theater seat, trying to figure out if the titular showdown actually was ended by a shared piece of familial trivia. That is how the Man of Steel died — not with a bang, not even a whimper, but a shrug.

The entire concept of the Fantastic Beasts movies — taking the magic of Harry Potter to 1920s NYC — is electric. By and large, the first two films have made good on that enormous promise ... with a few exceptions. Enter Mary Lou Barebone, a wizarding menace and fundamentalist street preacher who's gone by the end of the first film.

Barebone's savvy muggledom is unlike anything in the Harry Potter series. She was raised to understand that magic was very real (and totally evil), and so she started the Second Salem Church, dedicated herself to stamping out magic wherever it lay, adopted three children, and was ultimately murdered by the repressed force of her son's magical abilities. With her death, so died Fantastic Beasts' interest in the Second Salemers, replacing their antagonism with Grindelwald's. 

The effect of this is abrupt and disappointing, as Barebone's bizarre point of view introduced a fascinating new facet of wizard-muggle relations that fans never got to explore. Isn't one of the reasons the Fantastic Beasts movies even exist to delve into the wizarding world's non-British environs and all the unique cultures they spawned? Why dispose of a character as full of mystery and story possibilities as Barebone for the sake of British wizards we already know? No answers are likely to come, and so Barebone and her crusade are left to fade into cinematic shadows.

Much of Black Panther's storyline is concerned with the legacies T'Challa has inherited. His father looms largest, as his death makes T'Challa a king and reignites the family struggle that brought Killmonger back to Wakanda. Then there's the legacy of Wakanda itself that T'Challa must make sense of, from its technological advances to its historical isolationism. The character of Zuri unites these threads into one complex tangle. He's a beloved mentor to T'Challa, but he's also bound up in N'Jobu's death and its subsequent cover-up. His death at the hands of Killmonger as part of the ritual combat he himself organizes comes as both tragedy and cosmic re-balancing of scales.

Yet for all its import, it happens rather quickly. T'Challa is horrified, of course, but after he's thrown over the side of the falls, the movie moves on at a steady clip. This is to be expected, to some degree — it's a superhero movie, action is the order of the day — but the unique place Zuri occupied in T'Challa's life demands greater significance. Here was a man who embodied everything T'Challa inherited: the misdeeds of his father, Wakanda's place in the world, Killmonger's legitimate pain, the question of what a king's duties are to his people. That loss demands at last one more moment of reflection.