Misplaced Retribution in Live-Action Films.
- Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: One of the reasons Lex Luthor gives for wanting to destroy Superman is that God didn't save him from his abusive father when he was a child... not that Superman ever claimed to be a god, and Superman was himself a child at the same time, and could not have known about it.
- Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022): Sweet Pete decided to get revenge for being let go from Hollywood by getting other toons in his debt, kidnapping them when they fall behind on payments, then altering them to force them to star in his mockbusters for all time. It's horrifying only by itself, but it's more disgusting because all his victims had nothing to do with his life.
- Clash of the Titans (1981) plays with a combination of this and Disproportionate Retribution. During Perseus and Andromeda's wedding, Andromeda's mother, Cassiopeia, praises Andromeda's beauty, comparing it to that of Thetis... while in her own temple! In response, Thetis stops the wedding and demands Andromeda's life for Cassiopeia's insults, otherwise the kraken would destroy Joppa. In actuality, Thetis was using this as an excuse to carry out her son Calibos's wish for revenge.
- This is Two-Face's deal in The Dark Knight. After flipping the coin and letting The Joker (who actually orchestrated his tragedy) live, he goes after everyone who was involved in the events, no matter how weakly or by how many degrees of separation. On the one hand he declares that luck should decide who lives and who dies while he picks out who will be tried on the other, even to the point of threatening Gordon's son (so Gordon will understand what it's like to lose the person he loves most). He reasons that the Joker was "a mad dog" and he's going after the ones who let him off the leash and the people who failed in their job to stop him before the tragedy.
- The Friday the 13th series is chock full of this, with the victims including those with whom the killer had a personal beef, people who were associated with the guilty parties, people who were targeted just because they showed up on the killer's turf, and innocent bystanders who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Such examples include:
- The very first film's Big Bad, Pamela Voorhees, targets the counselors at Camp Crystal Lake because she blames them for the death of her son, Jason. Never mind that she already killed the counselors who oversaw Jason years ago, so everyone else are innocent.
- Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning: The killer Roy Burns goes on his killing spree to avenge the death of his son, Joey. Ironically, the one person he didn't kill was Vic, the guy who actually murdered Joey and was subsequently taken away for it before the killings even began.
- In The Frighteners, both newspaper editor Magda Rees-Jones and FBI agent Milton Dammers seem to believe that Frank Bannister outright murdered his wife (rather than her dying in a car accident that was admittedly his fault as most believe), and have appointed themselves to punish him for it. They're not wrong that Debra Bannister was murdered, but their misidentification of the murderer gets them both killed (in reality Debra was killed by Johnny Bartlett, a serial killer ghost trying to continue his murder spree as a ghost).
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Mark Russell blames Godzilla for the death of his son Andrew in the incidents of the first movie, even though the MUTOs were to blame for the destruction and Godzilla was actually the one who stopped them. Though it's unclear which Titan actually stomped on the Russells' house.
- The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: The pregnant Mrs. Mott loses everything after finding out her successful gynecologist husband is a serial rapist who abused his patients. When her lecherous husband commits suicide to avoid arrest, she finds herself penniless and has a late term miscarriage due to the heavy psychological strain, leading to an emergency hysterectomy that leaves her unable to have children. While her grief and anger are perfectly understandable, Mrs. Mott decides to seek brutal revenge on one of her husband's innocent victims who reported him to the police.
- Hellraiser: Hellworld: The Host reveals that he's torturing the protagonists because he blames them for his "beloved" son's suicide. Chelsea points out that this makes absolutely no sense because they were his best friends who loved him dearly and did everything they could to help him. Plus, The Host is a hypocrite because he walked out on his family over 16 years ago and didn't even attend his son's funeral, so he has no right to claim he cares about his son. The Host ignores this and continues the torment.
- Hitch: After Sarah's friend sleeps with a jerk who dumps her after their one-night stand (and it's heavily implied she was tricked into being the other woman), the jerk drops Hitch's name (what he says is "Date Doctor, my ass," which any idiot could tell implied Hitch did not help him). Sarah ends up assuming that Hitch simply tricks women into sleeping with Jerkass men and labels not only him, but his current client Albert in her column. While the former is Poor Communication Kills, since she never verified Vance's claim, the latter is Misplaced Retribution since she didn't even know Albert and just assumed he hired Hitch to help him bed a celebrity. Truthfully, Albert was just a dorky accountant in love with an Uptown Girl who needed help breaking the ice, and Sarah's article torpedoed his budding relationship, though fortunately, for a brief time.
- Home Alone: Kate sends Kevin to the attic for the mess in the kitchen, which was actually caused by Buzz eating Kevin's cheese pizza and taunting him over it.
- John Wick: Chapter 2: Cassian accepts a contract to kill John, who had murdered the woman he was bodyguarding earlier in the film. However, when the two of them ran into each other in a Truce Zone, John explained that he had only accepted that contract because he was called to honor a Marker, which is something that nobody in the underworld can refuse. Despite this and knowing that the person who put the contract on John's head was the man who called in John's Marker, and thus actually responsible for the death of Cassian's principal, Cassian still takes the job.
- Law Abiding Citizen has Clyde Shelton retaliate against anyone even remotely related to a deal the prosecutor made with his family's killers (the accomplice got the needle, while the actual killer was released)... except the prosecutor himself. Basically, his rage is against the US legal system, so anyone is fair game.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Avengers: Age of Ultron: Pietro and Wanda Maximoff hate the Avengers because they're associated with Tony Stark, whose company made the missiles that smashed into their apartment building, killing their parents and staring them right in the face for two days as they waited to see if it would explode as it also hampered efforts to rescue them. For some reason, they blame Tony for this, as there would be no shell to kill their parents if Tony had never made it in the first place. There's no indication that they blamed whoever fired the missiles, and they never mention hating Obadiah Stane, who sold it (probably without Tony's knowledge or consent). There's also the fact that their grievance, however justified or unjustified, is with one member of the team, and they get a perfect opportunity to get their revenge on him as an individual, not the group - but they go after the Avengers as a whole anyway (though this might have been spurred on thanks to anti-Avengers propaganda that HYDRA had been spreading throughout Sokovia).
- Played With in Captain America: Civil War. Baron Helmut Zemo's family was killed in the climatic battle of Age of Ultron. He blames the Avengers for it and plots to make them destroy each other, even though Ultron was the one caused the battle. However, the only reason Ultron even existed in the first place was because of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner (who themselves only made him because Tony was suffering from nightmares caused by Wanda).
- Played straight in the climax of the same film. Tony discovers that Bucky assassinated his parents and tries to murder him. He does this even though he's aware that Bucky spent several decades brainwashed by HYDRA and was not in control of his actions. Steve points this out, but Tony is too angry to listen to him. Then again, Steve had known the truth and kept it from Tony for two years, which worsened the situation. Plus, this was at the end of a very stressful sequence of events, and Zemo made sure Tony would only see the footage when he'd be too emotionally compromised to listen to reason.
- Luckily enough, T'Challa, after seeing all the damage the Cycle of Revenge wrought, decides to avert this trope, forgive Bucky, and offer him asylum in Wakanda until he can be deprogrammed, and capturing Zemo instead of killing him. He does this after wreaking havoc in revenge for the death of his father, playing this trope straight at first.
- Black Panther gives T'Challa a chance to exercise his character development, counterpointed by his cousin Erik "Killmonger" Stevens. Killmonger's father was killed by T'Challa's father T'Chaka in self-defense (not that Erik knew this part), leaving little Erik to grow up on the streets of Oakland in a period of deteriorating race relations. T'Chaka is already dead from unrelated causes (Baron Zemo had him assassinated), but Killmonger doesn't care, instead transferring his hatred to his cousin T'Challa, the nation of Wakanda for their isolationism, white people for racism existing, people of other races for not being black, and so on. Even when he meets his father in the afterlife and has the guy encourage his son to give up his hatred, he keeps going.
- Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: Shang-Chi ends up blaming his father for his mother's death since the gangsters wanted revenge for his Ten Rings days despite the fact that Wenwu had genuinely given up his criminal ways and obviously would have done anything to prevent her death given the insane lengths he's willing to go to bring her back. Wenwu returns the favor by criticizing Shang-Chi for not stopping Ying Li's murder, despite the fact that he was only 7 years old. Both characters are just taking out their immense grief on each other because they've already actually gotten revenge and that hasn't resolved their emotional issues or made them feel better.
- Matilda: When Mr. Wormwood sells Miss Trunchbull a dodgy car, the Trunchbull blames Matilda for it and throws her into the Chokey. Luckily for Matilda, Miss Honey finds her and gets her out of there.
- Nine Dead: The Kidnapper wants revenge against his nine captives for the role they played in the death of his son. These include the man who raped him, thus giving him AIDS, and the lawyer who framed him for a liquor store robbery. Fair enough, arguably... but it also includes the guy who was owed money by the real robber, and a priest who heard the confession of the robber.
- The Laurel and Hardy film Oliver the Eighth features a Black Widow villain who targets men named Oliver to attract with the prospect of a financially-beneficial marriage and then kill via throat-slitting the night before the wedding. Her motive is that she was originally set to marry a man named Oliver who abandoned her on their wedding eve, so now she seeks bloody vengeance on any who share his name. She has already killed seven Olivers in this way when Oliver Hardy responds to her latest "lonely hearts" request in the paper...
- In Red Dawn (1984), after the Eckert brothers and their friends kill a Soviet patrol following a chance encounter, Col. Bella, under orders of General Bratchenkov, orders the summary execution of more than a dozen people at the same time. This encourages the Eckerts and the other teens in their group to become the Wolverines, and conduct a guerilla campaign against the Soviets. The Soviets then keep executing more unarmed civilians since they don't know where the Wolverines are, and much less do they know how to catch them.
- The Scream series is both built on this and Disproportionate Retribution.
- The original Scream's primary killer is Billy Loomis, who initiates a murder spree in his town and attempts to finish it by murdering his girlfriend, because his girlfriend's mother had an affair with his father, hence causing Billy's mother to leave him. The fact that his girlfriend Sidney had nothing to do with this, and especially the fact that Billy already murdered Sidney's mother and successfully framed another man for it is utterly lost on Billy. The following murders and Sidney's were completely unnecessary save for the fact that whatever darkness was in Billy said they were needed. Then again, maybe it was In the Blood, considering...
- Scream 2's primary killer is Mrs. Loomis, Billy's mother. While she has a somewhat more understandable motive of wanting to avenge her son's death, it is equally lost on her that he committed his murder spree because she left him over something her husband did, and that her son died because Sidney was acting in self-defense, and for some reason another murder spree is needed in this vengeance where only 1/2 of the victims are tangibly related to the revenge by virtue of being tied to Sidney in some way (this excessive body count might have something to do with his co-killer, Mickey, who is a genuine serial killer she managed to find and recruit for aid). Once again, Sidney is targeted for death for something out of her control. It's also worth noting that Hank Loomis, the other hand in this affair, is barely mentioned and never once targeted for his part in it in any of the films.
- Scream 3's killer, Roman Bridger is retconned to be not only Sidney's half-brother, but also the ultimate start of the Ghostface mass killings, as, after Maureen rejected him due to being a Child by Rape, he was the one who told Billy about the affair and hence set him off onto the path that his death further set his mother onto. His motive for putting on the Ghostface mask and setting off a third spate of mass killings? That Sidney is now famous for surviving the first two massacres he caused to happen, fame he believes he himself should have. He desires revenge for crimes he caused to be committed against her that she had the gall to survive, something Sidney thankfully calls him on, hard.
- Scream 4's primary killer, Jill, is driven more by envy and I Just Want to Be Special than retribution, but once again it's someone basically seeking 'revenge' against Sidney because she somehow managed to survive being targeted by three separate serial killers and became famous for it. When you're being targeted for murder primary because you're a survivor, you know it's misplaced.
- Scream (2022) finally subverts this trope due to there being TWO main killers this time around instead of one main killer and an accomplice (Scream 3 being the lone exception due to there being only one killer). In this case, it's Sam's boyfriend Richie and Tara's classmate Amber, who have no personal vendetta against Sidney Prescott, but, in a vicious parody of modern toxic fandom, instead are a duo of Axe-Crazy "fans" of the 'Stab' movies (the in-universe film series loosely based off the "actual" Ghostface killings) who started up this new string of killings in an attempt to bring those movies back to their former glory. This is despite the fact that NONE of their victims, including poor Dewey, a survivor of the previous 4 movies, had done anything to incite their wrath or scorned them in anyway! Hell, Sidney and Gale, who had long since moved away by this point, had little to do with this until Dewy called them! So these two new Ghostfaces were just randomly targeting and killing people for no reason other than fame.
- However, this would be played straight again in Scream VI. The killers turn out to be Richie's father and his two younger siblings. They start by using social media to smear Samantha, making it look like she was the real killer who successfully framed Richie and got away with it. It works as most people show open dislike or fear towards Sam when they see her. Then they decide to target Sam's friends who moved to New York with her to make it seem like she was the killer all along, even trying but failing to kill Gale Weathers. All so when Sam is finally killed by the father, who is a decorated police officer, it would look like a serial killer was finally stopped, instead of a psycho family getting revenge against an young woman who used self-defense to save herself and her younger sister from an insane Stab fan.
- SHAZAM! (2019):
- When Dr. Sivana is seeking his vengeance, he ends up killing many innocent bystanders who have never wronged him.
- He unleashed the Seven Sins in a board meeting and didn't show any remorse when they murdered all the board members, who by all accounts were completely innocent. They just happened to be in the same room as his hated father and brother.
- He rationalizes that Billy Batson's hiding amongst the crowds is why, claiming that if he does not come out of hiding and finally show himself for the battle, Sivana will punish the civilians for his cowardice.Thaddeus Sivana: (floating above carnival-goers looking for Billy) CHAMPION! You don't deserve that name! Hiding behind innocent people, who will now die! Because deep down, you're still just a scared little boy.
- In the Spider-Man Trilogy, Harry is convinced that Spider-Man "killed" his father and even follows in Norman's footsteps as the New Goblin to try to avenge him, ignoring the fact that even if he did, his father was a mass-murdering maniac who threatened countless lives and put Spider-Man through the grinder. In reality, his father accidentally killed himself by being impaled by his own glider (though Harry doesn't learn this until the climax of the third film).
- Star Trek (2009) has Nero, who might be the craziest example on this page. When Spock fails to save his home world Romulus (including Nero's family) from a horrible natural disaster, Nero goes completely nuts and goes back in time to wipe out the entire Federation. He goes for Vulcan first since it's Spock's "fault" that Romulus is gone. Spock really tried his best to save Romulus, which in itself is amazing given the Romulans' less than pleasant history with the Federation (especially the Vulcans). Nero wants to wipe out the past, present, and future of Spock and everyone Spock loves anyway.
- Expanded media such as the novelisation elaborates that Nero believes the Federation basically let Romulus be destroyed as a deliberate act to remove the Romulans as a future threat, driving him to destroy Vulcan and Earth before he eliminates the star that destroyed Romulus in his timeline because he believes that otherwise the Federation will destroy Romulus in the future anyway.
- It's since been revealed in Star Trek: Picard that, while still not justifying what he did, his anger is only misplaced in the sense that it's aimed at the wrong timeline's Federation; the Federation of the Prime timeline really did leave the Romulans to rot (albeit after a devastating attack on Mars and the Utopia Planitia shipyards left them unable to produce enough ships to evacuate all the refugees), so Nero's anger is comparatively valid.
- In Star Trek: Nemesis, Shinzon directs his hatred of the Romulans towards Earth for reasons which make sense only to the screenwriter. It's never even explained what bizarre line of reasoning led to him wanting to destroy Earth and not, you know, Romulus. It's implied to be motivated by a particularly mean-spirited variation of Clone Angst, along with subsequent mental degeneration, but it still doesn't make much sense.
- Ted 2: Sam Jones tries to beat up John at Comic-Con for his car window getting smashed with a rock, which was really Ted's fault.
- Truth And Lies 2015: Taylor learns that her cyber-stalker is her new friend Cody, who justifies his actions- which include driving Taylor's best friend to suicide by publicly exposing her homosexuality before she was ready- because Taylor's father killed his parents in a car accident. While Cody can be bitter about his parents dying, he acts as though Taylor and her mother are all responsible for his parents' deaths when neither of them were in the car with her father when the accident took place and didn't even have anything to do with him being out at the time.
- The Wizard of Oz: The Wicked Witch of the West wants revenge on Dorothy for killing her sister. Except Dorothy didn't do that. She didn't make the house fall on the Witch of the East — she just happened to be inside it when it was caught up in the tornado.
- X-Men: First Class has this for Magneto. He hated humans since his mother was killed in the Holocaust. But the one who really killed his mother is Sebastian Shaw, a mutant who sided with the Nazis for his own gains. Even when he kills Shaw, he adopts his stance in wiping out mankind. This was somewhat downplayed by the previous movies where it's more clear that Magneto's desire to wipe out normal humans isn't motivated by retribution, but rather is a preemptive measure to protect mutants since he believes that history will inevitably repeat itself and sooner or later normal humans will try to wipe out mutants.
