Downer Beginning / Film

Films — Animation

• An American Tail opens with the Mousekewitz family's village being burned by Cossacks.
• Atlantis: The Lost Empire begins, obviously, with Atlantis sinking into the ocean.
• The start of Beauty and the Beast shows how a prince got transformed into a monster, and how he begged for forgiveness but received none. Being so ashamed of his new form, he concealed himself inside his castle and lost all hope in the Curse Escape Clause. All of this happens with that beautiful yet melancholy music in the background.
  Narrator: For who could ever learn to love a beast?
• Brother Bear starts with one character sacrificing himself to save his brothers from a bear and given a funeral pyre.
• Downplayed in The Emperor's New Groove. The film’s Cue the Rain opening is purposefully over dramatic and Played for Laughs. But it still has a more somber tone than the rest of the movie, especially when you learn why Kuzco is crying in the jungle: he’s a kid trapped in a Forced Transformation who just learned his parental figure wants to kill him and has lost the only real friend he’s ever had. All on his eighteenth birthday.
• Flash Gordon (1979) begins with fire falling from the sky and chaos in the city.
• The prologue of Disney's Frozen (2013) started with Anna and Elsa as little kids who joyfully played with each other until Elsa nearly killed her little sister by accident, continued with the two of them growing up isolated from each other as Anna lost her memory of Elsa's ice powers due to the trolls altering her thoughts, and Elsa lived in fear of her own powers, and ended with them as teenagers mourning the death of their parents. As co-director Chris Buck also co-directed Disney's Tarzan, Simon Brew of Den of Geek jokingly pointed out in an interview that he seemed to be Disney's go-to-guy for killing off parents at the beginning.
• How to Catch a Cold: The short begins with the man lamenting his poor health.
• Kung Fu Panda 2 opens with the story of how Lord Shen tried to avert a prophecy by exterminating the Giant Pandas.
• The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: The DUPLO aliens trashed the LEGO world and turned it into a wasteland.
• The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning begins with the death of Ariel's mother and the banning of all music from Atlantica.
• Madeline:
  • The third film, My Fair Madeline, starts as Madeline tries to stop some thieves, only to be dismissed as telling Blatant Lies and sent to finishing school for "misbehaving".
    • Dividing the film into acts causes the beginning act to have a Downer Ending, invoking the second act's Downer Beginning. The final act's Downer Beginning is where Madeline gets thrown in jail, invoked by the penultimate act's Downer Ending where she is arrested.
• One Stormy Night begins with Mei's mother being ripped apart by a pack of wolves (she even bites off one of the alpha wolf's ears!) and telling her son to run away as she does so, in what appears to be a very bleak beginning for an otherwise lighthearted tale about the friendship between a goat and a wolf.
• Pixar has done this more than once:
  • Finding Nemo: The movie begins with the death of Nemo's mother and all but one of their eggs.
  • Up. It starts with the main character Carl as a child, and shows him and the love of his life meeting, getting married, and growing old together. Since they were children, they had dreamed of going to Venezuela together to follow in the footsteps of their idol, but they kept having to postpone the trip. Carl finally buys two plane tickets, and his wife falls ill and dies before they can go. They also wanted to have kids, but at least one of them was infertile (or there was a miscarriage). We see Ellie in tears at the doctor's office when she is informed of the situation.
  • WALL•E, with its opening-scene depiction of Earth as an apocalyptic wasteland populated by roaches and a single still-functioning robot, is one of the most depressing openings ever.
  • The Incredibles starts with the incident that caused the superheroes' fall from grace, and then describes the Super Registration Act through a montage. Next we see several scenes showing just how depressed they are, pretending to be normal.
  • Ratatouille starts with the main character losing his home and family.
  • Toy Story 2: Not the film itself, but Rex's attempt at playing the Buzz Lightyear video game sees him get disintegrated by Zurg right as the battle starts. It's implied at the end that Hamm had the same thing happen to him.
  • Toy Story 3 opens with a sequence of Andy with his toys in their heyday, then timeskips to the stark contrast of them having been sitting in a chest, not having been played with for years.
  • The prologue of Brave started with the loss of Fergus's left leg to the demon bear Mor'du.
  • Cars 3 begins with Lightning McQueen enjoying his time as a race car until a new racer named Jackson Storm shows up and several of the veterans are replaced by next-gens as a result; eventually at the Los Angeles 500, when Lightning tries to catch up after being overtaken, one of his tires blows out, he swerves dangerously, then hits the wall sending him into a near-fatal crash, forcing him out of the race. Jackson eventually wins the Piston Cup, and Lightning spends the next four months worrying that he'll be forced to retire from racing for good.
• The Powerpuff Girls Movie opens rather dimly, with a dark background and crime rampant. Even the narrator's heart isn't in it.
• Even the cheerful film Rio is not exempt from this, showing the child Blu falling from a failed attempt to learn to fly and getting captured by a group of humans along with all the other birds - and shipped from Rio de Janeiro to the United States of America against his will.
• Not to be confused with Frozen, but in The Snow Queen (2012), the story starts with Gerda and Kai's parents being frozen into ice, killing them.
• Tangled zig-zags through this. The opening sentence is Flynn Rider saying "This is the story about how I died", however he goes on to assure the audience that things get better. It then goes on to show how the queen is dying of something, only to show her recover through a miraculous cure that is found. But then, it goes on to show the newly-born princess being kidnapped by Mother Gothel.
• Tarzan begins with Tarzan's future ape family losing their son to a vicious predator. Then Tarzan's human parents are killed, by the same predator. What's interesting is that it happens during an upbeat opening song by Phil Collins, of all people, who is known for his more dark and depressing stuff. The song did at least slow down and become more melancholic during and right after the death of Kala and Kerchak's son. This is, of course, a Disneyfied version of what happened in the novel, which also fits this trope, although it takes a lot longer. In the book, Kala loses her child not due to a predator but her own clumsiness, when she is running away from Kerchak, who goes apeshit and begins to attack the females of his tribe (he already bludgeons another female to death with a stick by this point). The child falls from a tree and dies. Tarzan's mother dies from a sickness, while his father is killed by Kerchak, who almost kills Tarzan before Kala grabs him.
• Titan A.E. begins with another race destroying planet Earth.
• Remember sweet, gentle Mole from The Wind in the Willows (1995)? Well, the sequel film The Willows in Winter (1996) begins with him seemingly drowning in an icy river and his friends breaking down in tears over it.

Films — Live-Action

• The 14 Amazons starts with the Imperial army being defeated by the invading Mongols, the heroic general of the royal army being Forced to Watch as his surviving men gets brutally flogged to death by Mongol soldiers, before getting executed himself. Then cue opening titles.
• Who can forget the start of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, which parodies the Downer Beginning of Cliffhanger, where Ace attempts a solo rescue mission to save a raccoon who has been stranded on the top of a mountain and sadly fails to get a grip on its paw. The kicker is it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie which is as wacky and lighthearted as any Ace Ventura film would be expected to be.
• Alien³: The third act of the preceding film (in which lead character Ellen Ripley rescues Newt from the xenomorph hive and defeats the Xenomorph Queen) is rendered null and void when it's revealed that the Queen was able to lay a facehugger egg onboard the Sulaco. The egg hatches, impregnates one of the survivors and is injured by broken glass, causing enough damage to create a fire and force the evacuation of the cryopods the survivors are in. The escape pod crashes on a backwater prison planet, causing Newt to drown and soldier Cpl. Dwayne Hicks to be impaled by a support beam, with Ripley barely surviving.
• All About My Mother: Manuela's beloved teenaged son Esteban is struck and killed by a car 12 minutes into the movie. The rest of the film is about how Manuela grows and changes after the tragedy.
• Arrival begins with Louise's 12-year-old daughter Hannah dying of cancer. The twist is that this hasn't happened yet. In fact, her daughter won't even be born until after the events of the movie.
• Assassin's Creed starts in the youth of Callum Lynch and sees his mother die and his father being abducted by the Templars.
• The opening narration of Ballad of a Soldier, about a Russian soldier in World War II, states plainly that at some date after the film's time frame, poor Alyosha will be killed in combat and buried near some town with "a foreign name".
• The Bespoke Overcoat: Attending the sad and lonely funeral of your best friend surely qualifies.
• Beyond the Lights begins with young Noni proudly getting 2nd place in a talent competition...and then her mother forcing her to throw out the trophy because second place isn't good enough for her, crushing Noni's excitement and joy.
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever begins with T'Challa dying of an unknown disease, which then cuts to his funeral a few scenes later.
• Blondie Johnson begins with Blondie's mother dying, her not unable to get welfare, and becoming homeless.
• Blue Beetle (2023) opens opens with Jaime, after graduating from college, learning that his family might lose their house due the landlord's increasing rent, and how his father lost his business due to suffering a heart attack, forcing him to cancel his plans to attend grad school to keep his family out of any further debt.
• Broken Blossoms begins with the protagonist starting off as a bright-eyed Chinese missionary moving to England to teach foreigners about Buddha. It then cuts to him a while later, more cynical and now addicted to opium.
• Carlito's Way begins with the protagonist being wheeled out of a train station on a gurney, critically wounded and narrating on his dismal prospects, which precedes another How We Got Here story.
• Conan the Barbarian (1982) has the title character, as a kid, losing his village and his family to Thulsa Doom and his evil raiders before being sold with other kids into slavery. "His was a tale of sorrow," indeed.
• The Dark Knight Rises begins eight years after the last movie with Bruce emotionally stunted, Wayne Enterprises in financial trouble and cracks starting to show in Gotham's peace time.
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes begins with what might be the mother of all bummer beginnings in film; it picks off right where the previous movie left off, with the ALZ-113 virus (now dubbed the Simian Flu) being spread globally, resulting in the fall of civilization and the near-extinction of the human race.
• The very first scene of Deadpool 2 is Wade (trying) to commit suicide, with the implication that Vanessa is also dead. It happens a few scenes later.
• The Descent: The first scene of the film ends with Paul and Jessica, Sarah's husband and daughter, dying by getting poles shoved through their heads in a freak car accident, and Sarah almost loses her mind right then and there as she collapses in Beth's arms at the hospital, suicidal.
• The Dirty Dozen starts with a hanging scene. An American GI is being hanged in a British military prison for robbery and murder.
• The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter begins with the eight brothers of the yang family, the only survivors of their army after losing a war, fighting their way through hordes and hordes of Mongol invaders, only to be killed in battle, one by one before the opening titles. There are only two surviving brothers by the time they escaped the battlefield, and one of them goes insane by the first act.
• A Far Off Place starts with the protagonist's parents getting killed when poachers invade their African reserve.
• Fly Away Home begins with the heroine's mother dying in a car accident. The heroine survives with injuries.
• Godzilla:
  • Godzilla (1954): The original film begins with a doozy — a group of innocent Japanese fishermen are heading home, playing the violin and dancing happily, when suddenly something erupts from the water, killing them all in a blinding flash of radiation. As if that wasn't bad enough, the whole scene is a reference to the real-life Lucky Dragon No. 5 tragedy, an event that was still fresh in the minds of the Japanese people at the time of release.
  • Godzilla vs. Destoroyah: The film begins with an island being destroyed, Godzilla Junior presumed missing (or possibly dead. He shows up later in the film.), and Godzilla attacking Hong Kong with parts of his flesh literally burning orange as he is slowly dying of nuclear overload.
• Grandmother's House: The movie begins at the funeral for David and Lynn's father. Since their mother isn't in the picture, it can be assumed that they are orphans.
• The first words of Happy Accidents are "Murder? Sam, Murder?" as Ruby confronts him tearfully.
• Hostage: The opening scene features a failed hostage negotiation where a woman and child are killed.
• Hounds of Love begins with the antagonists, a serial killer couple, abducting a teenager and keeping her chained to a bed before torturing her, murdering her, and burying her body in the woods.
• The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 begins with Katniss hiding from hospital doctors, desperately trying to keep her mind stable by saying things that she knows are true, like her name. Then she meets her friend Finnick who wishes for everyone to be dead, including himself.
• The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 has Katniss visiting her love interest Peeta in hospital, only to watch in horror as Peeta totally freaks out with aggression against Katniss.
• Inglourious Basterds starts with Shoshanna's (one of the protagonists') parents and siblings being massacred by Hans Landa and his Nazis, while she miraculously escapes the massacre.
• Irréversible is in the same vein due to its Back to Front nature. The gruesome No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and arrest by the police that concludes the story is put at the beginning, while the idyllic shots of an unharmed Monica Bellucci are the last thing we see. Let's talk about Downers.
• It (2017) opens with six year old Georgie Denbrough having his arm torn off and dragged into the sewers by a killer clown while screaming out his brother's name.
• James Bond: Some of the series' trademark Action Prologues don't start that well for 007.
  • You Only Live Twice: An American spacecraft is swallowed by a bigger spacecraft, cutting the lifeline of an astronaut and leaving him to die in space. Then Bond is seemingly gunned down to death in Hong Kong. Fortunately, he was just Faking the Dead.
  • The World Is Not Enough: The man Bond was tasked to protect, Sir Robert King, is assassinated, and the woman who killed him kills herself out of fear for what Renard could do to her without Bond having had time to gain informations from her.
  • Die Another Day: Bond is betrayed and his cover is blown. After seemingly killing Colonel Moon, Bond is captured by the colonel's father's men and tortured for months.
  • Skyfall: Bond is shot by mistake during a chase atop a train in Turkey and falls in a river, presumed dead.
  • No Time to Die: In the Distant Prologue, Safin kills a young Madeleine's mother and tires to kill her. In the present, the Action Prologue ends with Bond and Madeleine separating after being ambushed by Spectre agents.
• Jaws, Jaws 2 and Jaws: The Revenge all open with horrific, fatal shark attacks that set the tone. Jaws 3-D averts this by teasing an attack on the Sea World water skiing team. Unless you count the poor fish that gets eaten in the title sequence as a "victim."
• Joker (2019) begins with visibly distressed and down-on-his-luck clown Arthur Fleck putting on his makeup, trying desperately to smile as the news reports a garbage strike all over Gotham City which has entered its eighteenth day, signifying things going From Bad to Worse. When he's on the job at a closing-down music store, Arthur gets his "Everything Must Go" sign stolen by some punk kids who proceed to run off with it, lead him down into an alley, then smash the sign right over his head and beat the living shit out of him. All of this is in the first three minutes and forty seconds of the film, and considering that this is a villain origin story, things don't get much happier for him from here.
• The first and third of the Jurassic Park films start with someone getting attacked by a dinosaur. Though misremembered as otherwise, the little girl attacked in the second film survives.
• Kick-Ass starts off with a Black Humor downer, as a guy dressed as a superhero takes a swan dive off a building. (The comic version has another Downer Beginning.)
• Kung Pow! Enter the Fist begins with the Chosen One as a newborn on a rainy night as the villain enters his house and kills his parents. Then, the Chosen One pees onto the villain's face, setting the tone for the rest of the movie.
• In The Ledge, Hollis finding out that he is sterile, that he is not the real father of his children, and that he must now try to talk Gavin out of suicide.
• For the first fifteen minutes of Mad Max: Fury Road, Max is captured, beaten, tortured, and made a blood bag. He also loses his equipment and his car.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) starts with a young Peter at his mother's death bed. Stricken by grief, he runs away before being abducted by aliens.
  • Avengers: Infinity War starts with Thanos claiming two Infinity Stones, killing half the Asgardians, including Heimdall and Loki, and leaving badly injured Thor alone before the ship explodes.
  • Avengers: Endgame starts off with Clint Barton (Hawkeye) and his family having a nice picnic. Clint turns his back on them for a second and when he turns back, he sees that they have all been disintergrated thanks to Thanos' snap. Three weeks later, the surviving Avengers and Captain Marvel ambush Thanos on his farm with the intention of getting the Infinity Stones and undoing the snap. To their horror, they learn that Thanos had destroyed the stones to prevent further use. An enraged Thor decapitates Thanos, and the entire group is shell-shocked at the fact there is no hope to restore the executed half of the universe.
• Memento: You see Leonard kill Teddy despite his protests, and then you have to spend the rest of the movie watching the poor guy interact with Leonard.
• Midsommar: The movie starts with the main character's family dying when her mentally unstable sister commits suicide by inhaling car smoke and gassing her parent's room, killing them as well. That happens right after a cut to her boyfriend revealing he is thinking of dumping her because she is too needy, which he doesn't just because of that tragedy.
• New Police Story: The film opens with Inspector Chan's entire police team attempting to capture Joe and his gang of Cop Killer professionals, only to screw up royally with the entire team dying, Chan being completely humiliated and barely surviving, and ultimately resulting in Chan drinking himself to near unconsciousness every day for a whole year.
• Olympus Has Fallen starts with Mike Banning failing to save the First Lady from falling off the bridge to her death when the President's limo crashes in the snowstorm, which gives Banning a motivation to become a Action Hero for the rest of the movie.
• Oslo, August 31st starts with the lead, Anders, attempting suicide in a river after getting permission for an overnight leave from his rehab facility. It fails, but it doesn't improve the tone of the movie.
• The Panic in Needle Park opens with Helen riding home on the subway, alone, in distress, after getting an illegal abortion from a Back-Alley Doctor. Then it gets worse when she has to go the hospital because she won't stop bleeding. (The rest of the movie has her becoming a heroin addict so it doesn't get more cheerful.)
• Fitting its title, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End opens with the mass execution of anyone showing the slightest hint of sympathizing with a pirate. A child starts singing the coded song Hoist the Colours in defiance, which leads to the rest of the gallows joining in. This brief hint of hope is crushed when the villainous Cutler Beckett reveals that's precisely what he wanted them to do. "Finally."
• A Quiet Place opens up with the youngest son getting killed by one of the monsters after it hears noise coming from the toy rocket the boy was playing with.
• Sinister opens with an extremely graphic Super 8 video of a family (mother and children included) being hanged.
• Less than five minutes into Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Sonic is chased by a violent echidna tribe, is forced to leave his home forever, and his adoptive mother is presumably killed by said tribe. And he was just a little child when it all happened. He then talks about the next ten years of his life in a positive tone but it becomes quickly apparent to the audience that he is lying to himself and is desperately lonely and unfulfilled.
• Slumdog Millionaire. First, a scene from near the end with Jamal being tortured. Then, Jamal and friends are chased by angry cops. And the flashbacks that follow are far from happy.
• Special Female Force: The movie begins with the first iteration of the eponymous "Special Female Force" suffering a near Total Party Kill in a botched mission. The movie then Time Skips 20 years in the future where the Sole Survivor trains the new generation.
• Spring in a Small Town: The opening scene has Yuwen, a young wife in a Chinese village just after the end of World War II, walking along the village's shattered walls. She talks in voiceover narration about how the town is boring, how she wishes she could leave, how her family's once-lavish mansion was mostly destroyed by the war, and how her marriage has failed so badly that she and her husband hardly ever talk.
• Sucker Punch opens with Babydoll's mother dying, her younger sister being killed by her stepfather, and finally being dropped off for a lobotomy at the local sanitarium.
• Sudden Death starts with Darren failing to save a little girl in a fire, resulting in him quitting his job as a firefighter before becoming a security guard for the rest of the movie.
• Super 8 opens with the funeral of the protagonist's mother.
• The Terminator series, by virtue of being a franchise dealing with the potential genocide of the human race, dabbles with these openings frequently.
  • Terminator 2: Judgment Day starts with footage of the titular Judgment Day, followed by a futuristic battle that shows Resistance forces being killed in droves, humanity barely hanging on, and John Connor surveying the (close) battle before his scars are revealed.
  • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines shows flashes of the Robot War before revealing that Sarah Connor is dead (having died at some point between the two films) and John is a paranoid wreck who works a menial job and is prone to alcoholism.
  • Terminator Salvation begins with a mission John and other Resistance forces undertake during the opening years of the Future War, only to discover that it was a trap. The hostages they were trying to save (and the entire Resistance team, save for John) are wiped out in the ambush.
  • Terminator: Dark Fate goes one step further when it reveals that (as a result of an Alternate Continuity to the previous sequels past the second) John Connor is anticlimactically killed by a T-800 three years after the events of Judgment Day, with Sarah powerless to stop it and her holding her dead son in her arms.
• The Viral Factor begins with the hero Jon's botched escort mission, where one of his squad-mates betrays him and leads Jon's entire team to a terrorist ambush. The mission is a failure with almost everyone dying, Jon witnessing his fiancée / comrade-in-arms shot by the traitor, and himself getting a bullet in the temple which sees him with two weeks remaining.
• Walled In begins with a young girl named Julie waking up to find herself trapped in a confined space and about to drown in cement.
• Who Am I (2014) starts with the hero entering a hotel room with three dead bodies inside. The rest of the movie tells the story of How We Got Here.
• The World of Kanako: The start of the movie is very dark in many ways: Akikazu finds out that his wife has a lover and he loses his job after a violent outburst. Some bloody murders are detected. The narrator gives a saddening speech about how helpless his situation is. Kanako's first boyfriend Ogata commits suicide and nobody takes notice.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men starts in a concentration camp. So does X-Men: First Class.
  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine: James Howlett's father is murdered, leading the boy to kill the assassin, Thomas Logan... and he discovers that Logan is his real father. So Jimmy is forced to run away along with Logan's other son, Victor.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: In the year 2023, we get a glimpse of a post-apocalyptic world where mutants (who are near extinction) and their human allies are either placed in internment camps, or are outright murdered en masse.

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