In Against the Wall, Ed is abruptly and quickly gunned down during the climactic raid. For some, it takes being told he got gunned down by Smith for it to click that he even died.
Alien³: After battling their way through to the end of Aliens, Newt and Hicks are killed off in the opening scene, effectively making the events of the previous movie pointless. Their deaths are not even seen on screen. They just died when their ship crashed.
Zoe Cox from the TV movie American Meltdown. After spending most of the movie hiding from the terrorists, she finally starts to explore the power plant the terrorists have taken over and finds out someone set up a few bombs. Then she's abruptly shot to death.
Gaston's death in Beauty and the Beast (2017), though in this case the bridge literally collapsed from under him.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes. The protagonists of both the first (Taylor) and the second (Brent) being shot by gorillas after an intense battle, followed by an Earth-Shattering Kaboom, is cruel but not anticlimactic. The preceding scene, where Taylor's girl Nova is shot down by a single gorilla, not so much.
The Bourne Series film The Bourne Legacy threatens a big showdown between Cross and LARX-3, but Marta tips over LARX-3's bike right before Cross and LARX-3 make contact.
In Burn After Reading, while sneaking around in the CIA agent's house, Brad Pitt scares the guy who's sleeping with the agent's wife, who quickly shoots him in the head. Of course, this all fits with the Farcical Black Comedy of the movie. Not to mention, his death comes as especially shocking because it's a well-known trope that the "stupid but well-meaning goofball" almost NEVER dies.
In The Crawlers a.k.a. Troll 3 a.k.a. Creepers a.k.a. Contamination .7, the heroes confront the Big Bad and demand to know the location of the illegal dumping site he's been using to dump chemicals so he can embezzle money. He laughs at how they expect him to cooperate and pulls out a gun. Even though he could just shoot at least one of them or just tell them the location and run off with his embezzled money while they're busy, he instead shoots himself in the head.
Two-Face in The Dark Knight. After about 20 minutes of screen time after his turn to the dark side, and he quickly gets knocked off a building. Or Rachel. After the character development she gets in this movie, and the awesome scene of her standing up to the freaking Joker, you'd think she'd get a somewhat meaningful death, not tied to a chair and blown up.
Bane's death in The Dark Knight Rises was disappointingly anticlimactic. After spending the entire film being an Implacable Man, being blown away in one shot by Catwoman was nigh humiliating to say the least. We didn't even get one last look at the body. This might be because he was shot by what amounted to a small tank cannon, which would kill anyone quickly and not leave much to look at beyond a very unpleasant (not to mention worthy of nothing less than an R rating) mulch of human pieces. Not to mention Talia al Ghul, who suffers death by whiplash!
Looks to be what happens to most of the cast of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra in the sequel, G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Marlon Wayans, the actor who played Ripcord in the first film, jokingly mentioned that Ripcord was killed offscreen by friendly fire.
Glass (2019): After 19 years of waiting for a sequel to Unbreakable, fans were less than pleased when David Dunn is drowned in a puddle. While his death did ultimately turn out to have meaning, the unimpressive circumstances of his death has been a sore spot.
Halloween: Resurrection opens with Michael Myers killing Laurie Strode, the heroine of the first twomovies and the last one. Given the character's track record against Michael in the past, the stupid mistake the character made while trying to finish him off for good (despite knowing better), the Ass Pull used to bring Michael back from his decisive death in the last movie, and the overall quality of the rest of Resurrection, many fans prefer to declare the entire film to have never happened.
Assuming that you count Blofeld's final demise as happening in Diamonds Are Forever, then the Biggest Bad in Bond history is killed because 007 gently swings his submarine into the side of the oil rig. Hardly the demise you'd expect for such a major character. Oh, don't worry, he returns as an unnamed, wheelchair-bound old man in For Your Eyes Only... and is comically killed in the opening sequence. By being dropped down a chimney. While pleading for his life.
Mister Bond! Mister Bond! We can do a deal! I'll buy you a delicatessen! In stainless steel!!
The person who owned the copyright to Blofeld was trying to use it to wrestle for control of the series proper. Knocking off a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of Blofeld was basically the owners' declaration of independence and burning of bridges to assert that Bond did not depend upon Blofeld as an antagonist. Which is all well and good until you realize it doesn't make much sense to do it at that time in Roger Moore's fifth outing and several more films since Blofeld's last appearance.
Also, there's Plenty O'Toole. After being unceremoniously thrown out a window into one pool, she later shows up dead in a completely different pool. As she had utterly no connection to the main plot other than being a woman who hits on Bond in a casino, her somehow ending up in Tiffany's pool made no sense at all. (specially once a scene showing Blofeld's henchmen mistaking her for Tiffany was deleted)
In Bruno Mattei's unofficialJaws sequel Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws, a bunch of characters are killed off very awkwardly in a scene where they're on a boat trying to shoot the shark when suddenly the woman in the group starts getting hysterical and for no reason grabs an open tank of gasoline and raises it over her head, accidentally pouring gasoline all over herself and the guy next to her, and then another guy gets right in the way of the pouring gasoline and fires a flare gun, causing the ship to explode. This was just an excuse to use footage of a boat blowing up, stolen from a similar scene in Jaws 2.
Kickboxer, one of Jean-Claude Van Damme's most famous movies spawned four direct-to-video sequels, none of which actually feature Van Damme. Kickboxer 2 starts with Van Damme's character and his older brother already dead after being shot by the vengeful Tong Po (who is, apparently, a sore loser), and switches to their (previously unmentioned) younger brother who, of course, must fight Tong Po in the end. Kickboxer 5 has the younger brother killed off-screen by the new Big Bad for refusing to let the guy promote him in the very first scene.
Bill in Kill Bill: After carving a bloody trail through 2 full movies just to get to Bill, Beatrix kills Bill in a ridiculously short fight scene that lasts just 20 seconds without Bill landing a single blow on her. Every single significant character Beatrix fought before Bill turned out to be a greater challenge than Bill was.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle takes Roxy, who was a very developed and liked character in the first movie as how now been promoted as part of Mission Control, and kills her abruptly once the Kingsman headquarters are destroyed. And considering Merlin has a Dying Moment of Awesome later in the movie, it makes Roxy's demise even more unsatisfying.
Main Street Meats: At the end of the movie, everyone has found out that the siblings running the titular butcher shop have been feeding them people meat, so Floyd decides to go to his old thinking spot on the bridge. He hears a horn in the distance... and looks up just in time to see the train that splatters him on his front less than a second later.
Hogun, Fandral, and Volstagg are all casually dispatched by Hela near the beginning of Thor: Ragnarok, in a cross between a Bridge Drop and The Worf Effect to demonstrate how powerful she is. Worse, we don't even get to see Thor mourn their deaths despite them having been three of his closest friends and allies in the previous movies, and poor Fandral doesn't even get any lines before Hela skewers him.
Earlier examples are in Guardians of the Galaxy where The Other (Thanos's servant who serves as contact between him and Loki without revealing Thanos's identity until the end of The Avengers) gets his head twisted 180 degrees by Ronan for The Worf Effect, and Avengers: Age of Ultron where Baron von Strucker, the shadowy Hydra agent seen at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, is killed offscreen by Ultron shortly after capture.
Vision was proven to be useful and powerful against Ultron after being created in Avengers: Age of Ultron due to the fact that he can carry the Mjolnir and destroy several Ultron sentries. Until Avengers: Infinity War came over where he gets drastically weakened due to Corvus Glaive's spear twice in a row (first in Scotland then in Wakanda) and finally got killed by Thanos after stripping off the Mind Stone on his head leading to the completion on the Infinity Gauntlet, creating a triple threat combination of The Worf Effect, Worf Had A Flu and getting a bridge dropped on him.
Then, in Avengers: Endgame, a weakened Thanos is easily overpowered by the Avengers and decapitated by Thor at the beginning of the film, after having been built up to for six years before being the Big Bad of Avengers: Infinity War and wiping out half the universe. Partially averted in that an alternate timeline version of Thanos from 2014 (who was technically the same Thanos before the timeline split) travels to the main timeline to serve as the film's Big Bad with a more climactic battle and death.
The character of Tank was killed between the first and second films in The Matrix after the actor, Marcus Chong, was involved in an especially messy contract dispute. An alternate interpretation averts this trope if one chooses to believe that Tank died from the injuries he sustained during the first movie, thus turning his Moment of Awesome into a Heroic Sacrifice.
Godzilla (2014) sets up Bryan Cranston's character as a major protagonist with an integral role in the story. Minutes after the male MUTO gets released, he LITERALLY gets a bridge dropped on him and dies without warning.
In Kong: Skull Island Bill Randa is a major character throughout the first half of the film, only to abruptly be taken out by a Skullcrawler halfway through like a Red Shirt and never be mentioned again. It's even worse when you realize he survived what was heavily implied to be a Godzilla attack.
Johnny Cage is killed by Shao Kahn within the first 10 minutes of the film to show how powerful, not to mention petty, Shao Kahn is.
Sheeva is killed when a cage is dropped on her.
In Mr. Nice Guy, Diana, the Damsel in Distress of the first act, may be either this or suffer from Chuck Cunningham Syndrome. She gets a knockout punch from one of the gangsters towards the end and is never seen or mentioned again.
In Next of Kin (1982), Linda's boyfriend Barney is unceremoniously killed off after he goes into the old house to investigate some strange noises.
No Country for Old Men's Llewellyn Moss is killed offscreen. And NOT by Anton Chigurh, the guy chasing him almost the entire movie. Possible subversion in that it was more than likely that this was a deliberate move — it's not the film's only moment where audience expectations are completely turned on their heads.
Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2: It is stated (and shown) that Paul's mother was hit by a milk truck not long after the events of the first movie.
The Kraken. It's an incredibly dangerous menace in the second film and is still around when it ends. Did you think the third film will have our protagonists engage the Kraken in an epic final battle? Well, if you were expecting that, you were probably very disappointed when the Kraken only appears in the third film ... as a corpse. It's stated Cutler Beckett ordered Davy Jones to kill it, the implication being that Jones having the Kraken made him too difficult or too dangerous for Beckett to control. This feeling was likely intentional, however, as it shows how Beckett is destroying the magic of the old world, forcing Jack to become Neutral No Longer.
Fans of James Norrington also regarded felt he got this treatment (and possibly Governor Swann as well). Though at least Keira Knightley and Jack Davenport got to do some really enormous acting in the process.
Sometime between At World's End and On Stranger Tides, the Black Pearl is attacked and sunk by Blackbeard, with Barbossa as the only known survivor. It's not clear whether the rest of the crew is dead or merely trapped in the magic bottle Blackbeard put the Black Pearl in, however, so they could still potentially be alive.
The Rental: Mina is set up to be the Final Girl as she is literally the last person left alive and she's running away from the killer...only to fall off a cliff to her death.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World had a strange one when rival rock band Crash and the Boys were unceremoniously killed off by Matthew Patel (in fact they were the only non-villains killed off) even though they had a larger role in the comic.
Randy Meeks, who provided the "rules" for the first three Scream films gets unexpectedly yanked into Gale's news van about halfway through the second film during a telephone call with the killer (who had been hiding in the van) and is then stabbed to death. The same goes with Cotton Weary who, after getting a Big Damn Heroes moment at the end of the second film, is killed off in the opening prologue of the third in about ten minutes of screentime. Though Randy was Genre Savvy enough to make a Video Will, as discovered in the third film.
Wash in Serenity (2005). Also an example of Killed Mid-Sentence. He is celebrating his safe landing when a harpoon crashes through a window and impales him, killing him instantly. It was used deliberately in this instance, to give the following scenario — with the entire cast trapped and fighting a holding action to give Mal enough time to transmit a message — a real sense of Anyone Can Die jeopardy that was lacking in the original script. Joss Whedon says in the Serenity commentary that he originally didn't intend for anyone other than Book to die, but then he finished the script and realised that the stakes weren't high enough, and that it was kind of implausible for them all to get through unscathed. Therefore, he did his evil Joss trick of picking the character that would be the most heart-wrenching to kill, and proceeding. YMMV on whether this had the intended effect, to put it mildly.
Shoot to Kill: The innocent fishermen get several scenes as Red Herring suspects with some interesting City Mouse moments, then all four of them die within the space of a minute or so once Norman sees Steve's gun halfway through the movie.
The film version of Slaughterhouse-Five has Derby, up to that point Billy Pilgrim's constant friend and companion, summarily executed at the back of the frame while two minor characters (both Germans) are talking in the foreground. It's actually very effective, because ... that's the way it happens in wartime.
Captain James T. Kirk's death in this film is the Trope Namer. As originally written and filmed, Kirk was shot In the Back by Soran, but test audiences really didn't like that at all. So they went back to the Valley of Fire and reshot the scene to have Kirk having to get Soran's remote while on a collapsing bridge, finally getting to use it just as the bridge gives out. So, Kirk was actually dropped with the bridge; it just ended up landing on top of him. (An actual case of "Bridge on the Captain," rather than "Captain on the Bridge.")
It also applies to Robert and René Picard who both are killed off-screen.
The Enterprise-D herself. Taken out by a century-old Bird of Prey that by all rights shouldn't have posed a threat to a Galaxy-class starship.
Data's death in Star Trek: Nemesis. This one was actually decent conceptually, as Data rescues Picard and then dies in a Heroic Sacrifice to destroy the Big Bad's ship before it can wipe out all life on the Enterprise-E and then Earth. It's more the execution that's at fault here, with Data not getting any last words with Picard, and then the ship's destruction being very abrupt and anti-climactic. In Star Trek: Picard, they bring back Data partially as an Authors Throw to give him a more poetic and satisfying send-off.
Many Jedi die quite abruptly, but Aayla Secura is executed particularly brutally, being shot over and over as if to assure us that she's really dead. Amazingly, some people still insisted that she wasn't.
Averted with Mace Windu. Samuel Jackson explicitly refused to participate in the movie if a bridge was to be dropped on his character. That said, his death scene was one of the most memorable of the film.
Count Dooku was powerful enough to curb stomp Obi-Wan and Anakin, and go head-to-head with Yoda. He gets killed unceremoniously in the first fifteen minutes of Episode III because Anakin's power has grown beyond Dooku at this point.
Admiral Gial Ackbar (the Mon Calamari admiral from Return of the Jedi) is blown into space by Kylo Ren's wingmen at the same time as Leia. Leia survives due to her use of the Force, but Ackbar is barely given a passing mention.
Supreme Leader Snoke's death happens midway through the film. Kylo Ren bisects him with Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber and he falls over dead, and that's about it. There is a moment given for him to appreciate the fact that his apprentice just turned on him, but it doesn't last long, and then it's on to the Back-to-Back Badasses scene.
Luis Buñuel's final film That Obscure Object of Desire features a May–December Romance couple where the young girl keeps on breaking the old man's heart, but he keeps winning her back over and over again. The final scene sees them walking happily only to start arguing again and suddenly the screen is consumed by a random explosion that kills them.
Tower of Death, the last film starring Bruce Lee released 8 years after Bruce's real-life death, notably had Bruce's scenes being clobbered together from leftover footage from his previous works, before killing Bruce's character, Billy, roughly half an hour in via falling from a helicopter (with a stunt double stand-in for Bruce, whose demise was shown from a distance away). The movie then quickly introduces Billy's brother, Bobby, who takes over as the main hero.
One would expect the extremely badass Ironhide from the Transformers Film Series to go down in battle guns blazing but in Dark of the Moon, he's shot in the back by Sentinel Prime's cosmic rust gun and dissolves into a pile of rust.
Utøya: July 22, a reenactment of the Breivik Massacre (which happened on the island Utøya on 22. July 2011) from the perspective of the victims has the death of Kaja, the main heroine. In a film where random characters have lengthy death scenes with lots of last words (wounded girl) or a long corpse scene to signify the horror of their death (little boy), Kaja gets neither. She is suddenly shot just before she can answer a silly line by Magnus, she appears OK at first, then keels over without as much as a sound. She gets NO last words, not even a Really Dead Montage. Worse, the camera itself betrays her - rather than stay with her in her last moments, it switches immediately to Magnus (who before that had, like 10 minutes of screen time) and concentrates on his escape, showing no more consideration for Kaja.
Nearly everyone in The Wages of Fear. Luigi and Bimba's truck explodes in an incident we don't see. Mario and Jo drive up to inspect the aftermath, but they can't figure out what had caused it. Mario also dies in literally the last few seconds of the movie, in a mundane car crash on his joyride back to Las Piedras.
The character of Fox in The Warriors was originally meant to be a more substantial presence in the film, particularly in that Mercy, the girl the gang picks up during their escape back to Coney Island, was originally meant to be his love interest. Since the two actors playing Fox and Mercy had no chemistry together, the script was rewritten so that Mercy hooked up with gang leader Swan instead. The actor who played Fox actually left the film over this, so he was written out of the script by being run over by a subway train during a scuffle with a cop.
Notoriously, X-Men: The Last Stand eliminated several franchise regulars, with arguably the most controversial example being that of Scott Summers, aka Cyclops. Despite acting as the team's field leader and, within the regular comic series, their linchpin since inception, he's quickly killed off-screen within the first 30 minutes of the film by his newly resurrected fiancee, Jean Grey. As though that wasn't bad enough, his death barely registers with the rest of the cast later on in the film, with only a brief mention by Professor X who doesn't seem overly perturbed by the loss of his surrogate son.
To some of the general public, Cyclops' anti-climactic death might not have been that big of an issue as his screentime got shafted in the previous 2 films in favor of Wolverine, who acted as the series' cinematic alpha hero. However, for fans of the comics, the death was also a slap in the face of sorts since the film's plot was heavily influenced by the comics' extremely well-regarded The Dark Phoenix Saga that focuses on Jean and Scott. Within the context of X-Men 3, that story became a secondary plot thread, and Wolverine was substituted in as the romantic/heroic lead in light of Scott's less-than-stellar death. His death proved so unpopular that years later, it was explicitly undone via Cosmic Retcon in X-Men: Days of Future Past.
Also, Professor X is killed off midway through the film. Coupled with the fact that Rogue and Mystique were both Put on a Bus and Jean had basically removed herself from the X-Men/Brotherhood fray (due to the aforementioned sidelining of the Dark Phoenix plot, along with her power escalation), you have a climax that barely features any of the characters from the previous two movies.
Also of note in the third film are Kid Omega, Arclight, Psylocke, and (presumably) Juggernaut, all of whom unceremoniously fall victim to Jean Grey's psychotic "burn everything" episode near the film's conclusion.
In X-Men: First Class, Oliver Platt's unnamed character is introduced as being a potential "M" for Xavier's Bond, providing a facility, sponsoring the recruitment of the X-Men, protecting them from the rest of the CIA, and above all he comes across as sympathetic to the mutants. Long-time X-Men fans familiar with the very early years of the franchise are also left wondering if he's Fred Duncan, a major ally of Xavier and his contact in the US Government during the 1960s, transplanted from the FBI to the CIA for the movie version. Then, not halfway through the film, the base is attacked and Azazel drops the guy to his death from high in the sky, and that's the end of Mr. Platt's involvement in the film.
For comic book fans, the abrupt killing of Darwin was a solid example. For reference, his survival power works whether he wills it to or not and has done such things as cause him to bounce harmlessly off pavement while attempting suicide, be teleported two states away from an enemy he couldn't beat, survive the vacuum of space, be reconfigured into pure energy, and copy the powers of a death goddess. What kills him in the movie? A plasma ball not even bigger than a fist.
In the tie-in material, it's revealed that Warren Worthington III is killed by Sentinels during a mutant protest. He likely is brought back later by the Cosmic Retcon.
According to the tie-in material, Future Beast gets dragged from his home and murdered by a mob of mutant-hating humans akin to the "Friends of Humanity" from the '90s animated series. Doubles as a Call-Back if you're watching the prequel before watching the main X-Men trilogy.
X-Men: First Class spent a good bit of time introducing some new mutants, such as Banshee, Emma Frost, Angel, Azazel, Riptide, and Havok. One sequel later in this movie, Havok gets a few minutes of screen time before being rescued by Mystique. As for the rest, Riptide isn't mentioned, and Banshee, Emma, Angel, Azazel are all pronounced dead by Young Magneto. While they were killed between films, Raven/Mystique infiltrates Trask's office, where the audience is then treated to some photographs of the aforementioned mutants... post-autopsy. As a bonus, one of Angel's wings can be found in a vault.
In xXx, Vin Diesel plays an extreme sports master named Xander Cage who is recruited for his unconventional specialties and skills by a secret government organization. When Vin Diesel dropped out of the sequel, xXx: State of the Union, and was apparently somewhat unprofessional about it, it is announced early in the film that his character has been killed offscreen, and a new character, Darius Stone, replaces him. On top of that, Stone is said to be "tougher and nastier" than Cage when xXx's superior is considering his replacement. In the DVD release, this is explained: Simply put, he goes into a building, which promptly blows up. To emphasize the deadness, two things come flying out of the wreckage - his charred torso and the portion of his neck with the 'xXx' tattoo on it, complete with ears. They must have forgotten their own script because, in the movie, Agent Shavers tells Darius Stone that the last xXx died in some sort of freak snowboarding accident. See also the franchise's entry on the Actor Leaves, Character Dies page, as the reason for this abrupt and poorly-explained offscreen death was allegedly that Vin Diesel and the producers didn't part on good terms. By the time Vin Diesel decided he wanted to return to the franchise, this was obviously undone.
