Unwitting Instigator Of Doom / Live-Action Films

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#-L

• In 28 Weeks Later, Tammy and Andy Harris decide to leave the safe zone and return to their home which, might I add, is in a heavily quarantined area of Britain, so they can get a picture of their mother. Once they get there, not only do they get a photo of her, but they also find that she's alive and well. The bad news is that she's also a carrier of the Rage Virus, meaning that she can transmit the virus to anyone who decides to kiss her, something her husband finds out the hard way.
  • At the end of the film, it turns out that Andy is a carrier just like his mother, which is most likely the main reason why the Infected are now in Paris.
• Abominable: CJ's decision to volunteer her uncle's cabin for Michelle's bachelorette party has the unfortunate and unforeseen side effect of putting the girls in the same neighborhood as a homicidal Bigfoot-creature, which seems more enticed than repelled by the noise from their celebration.
• Aliens:
  • A Xenomorph warrior stows away onto the marines' dropship and kills the pilots, Spunkmeyer and Ferro. This not only dooms it to die when the dropship crashes into the colony's power station, but dooms its fellow Xenomorphs to nuclear annihilation when the power station's cooling system is ruptured in the crash.
  • Lieutenant Gorman's last act in the movie indirectly causes the events of Alien³. The blast from the grenade he uses to commit suicide with causes Newt to fall into the flooded section of the colony where she gets abducted by the aliens. This forces Ripley to rescue her from the atmosphere processor, giving the Queen alien a chance to stow away to the Sulaco. The eggs the Queen managed lay aboard ship eventually kill everyone in Alien 3.
  • The Alien Queen wouldn't have had the chance to get on the Sulaco had Ripley not mashed the call buttons for both service elevators, which allowed the Queen to follow Ripley and Newt to their rendezvous point with Bishop.
• The Amazing Spider-Man Series: In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Spidey manages to calm Max Dillon down and is ready to talk it out with him without any fisticuffs, until a police sniper interpreted Max suffering from Power Incontinence as a hostile act and shoots him. This and the New Yorkers rallying behind Spider-Man while heckling Max caused him to further go through Sanity Slippage and start to believe Spider-Man betrayed him.
• Spider-Man Trilogy: early drafts for Spider-Man 3 had John Jameson unknowingly bringing the Venom symbiote back from a space mission.
• Arlington Road: The film centers around a college professor, Michael, who begins to suspect that his neighbors are domestic terrorists. At the film's climax when his suspicions are confirmed, Michael rushes to the intended target, FBI headquarters, to raise the alarm. He's told that everything is fine; in fact, the only thing out of the ordinary is his presence there. Too late he realizes the neighbors set him up, knowing he would go to the FBI and warn them, and he finds the bomb in his trunk only moments before it goes off.
• Armored: Ty adamantly refuses to take part in the robbery, and it is implied that the others are (unhappily) willing to abandon the robbery if he doesn't join them. Then, mere minutes later, a Child Services agent shows up to tell Ty that he's likely to lose custody of Jimmy due to their financial situation. The pressure she puts on Ty leads to him joining the others and several people dying.
• The art gallery owner who auctions of the seven cursed paintings in Art of the Dead.
• Au revoir les enfants: The cook, Mme. Perrin, probably didn't realize that making a scene and getting Joseph fired for stealing lard would cause him to spitefully summon the authorities and get her employer and three Jewish students sent to concentration camps.
• Snoop, the airport sniffer dog from Babe: Pig in the City falsely detects that Babe and Esme are carrying illegal substances. Thanks to the interrogation that he brought upon them they miss their flight and are forced to stay in Metropolis. It is here where the film's plot really starts to kick in.
• In Back to the Future Part II, a man from 2015 makes an offhand comment to Marty McFly about using knowledge of the future to bet on sports games. The end result is the Biff-horrific 1985 that Doc Brown and Marty return to. When Doc and Marty travel to 1955, we see that the man was actually the mechanic who fixed Biff's car after it got wrecked in the first film, which retroactively makes him this trope for that film, too, as Biff's anger about how expensive the repairs were drives him to hunt down Marty and then tries to assault Lorraine.
• In Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, Nishi's revenge plot is scuppered by his father's well-meaning widow, who innocently reveals his real identity to one of the men Nishi wants to destroy.
• Carl Grissom in Batman. Grissom, furious that mobster Jack Napier is in an affair with his mistress, orders the police to take him out at Axis Chemicals. This leads to Batman's arrival and unsuccessful attempt to save Napier, which leads to the crook falling into a vat of chemicals, and...well, you know the rest.
• Boy Eats Girl: First Grace causes her son to hang himself accidentally, and then through resurrecting him wrong ultimately she kills most of the town.
• Linda in Burn After Reading. She sends Chad to Harry's house where he winds up dead, then sends Ted over to find what happened to Chad (who then ALSO ends up dead), then accidentally scares Harry into fleeing the country when she mentions Chad's disappearance in a conversation with him.
• At the end of Contagion (2011), it was revealed that the casino chef who handled the pig infected with MEV-1 wiped his hands on his apron rather than properly washing them after being called to pose with Beth for a photo, transmitting the virus to her and triggering the global pandemic.
• Mole McHenry in Desperate Living. By throwing a mudball at Queen Carlotta, she was unknowingly responsible for kicking off the Queen's plot to spread rabies to everyone in Mortville, with Princess Coo-Coo being the first and only "patient" of said vaccination.
• The original Die Hard has the Intrepid Reporter Thornburg. After he gets desperate for a juicy story about the attack on Nakatomi Plaza, he decides to broadcast a photo of John McClane on the evening news after discovering who he is. Thanks to this, the Big Bad Hans Gruber (who's watching the news from inside the building) is able to deduce that his hostage Holly Gennero is actually McClane's wife — allowing him to use her as leverage against McClane, and nearly getting her killed. To a lesser extent, Harry Ellis can be seen as this since he gives out Johns identity to the Terrorists which in turn Richard gets allowing Hans to find out about Holly !
• In The Elite Squad, there's the unknown journalist who takes a photo of Matias and inadvertently reveals the fact that he's a cop to the drug dealers. It ruins Matias' relationship and leads to another character's death.
• Kenny Linder from The Fast and the Furious. If he hadn't accidentally killed Dominic's and Mia's father in a racing crash, Dominic wouldn't have beaten him savagely with a wrench and gotten himself banned from racing. And then he wouldn't have turned to hijacking trucks to fund his street racing. And then Brian wouldn't have gotten involved, etc. In short, Kenny Linder is indirectly responsible for the entire series.
• In The Fisher King, radio shock-jock Jack Lucas isn't aware that one of his callers, Edwin, is mentally unstable when he sarcastically tells Edwin to go kill some yuppies. This inspires Edwin to commit a mass murder-suicide at a Manhattan restaurant, which not only costs Jack his career and turns him suicidal, but destroys the sanity of one victim's widower to the point he becomes convinced that he is a knight seeking the Holy Grail.
• The Fly (1986): Stathis, Veronica's editor and ex-lover, becomes a Stalker with a Crush over the first act as he tries to sabotage her blossoming romance with Seth Brundle. This comes to a head when he threatens to have Particle magazine break the story of Seth's teleportation technology ahead of her book deal with Seth if she doesn't break up with him. Veronica, not wanting to get sweet Seth involved in her personal drama, decides to confront Stathis right away without explaining things; unfortunately it's in the middle of their celebration of Seth finally successfully teleporting a living creature. Seth misinterprets what he does know about their relationship and assumes he's being cuckolded. Out of jealousy, he gets drunk and foolishly decides to jump ahead to the climax of his project — teleporting himself — and this proves to be a Tragic Mistake that turns him into more of a villain than Stathis ever was.
• The Godfather:
  • Sonny showing interest in Sollozzo's deal despite his father's opposition to said deal is what spurs Sollozzo to plot an attempt on Vito's life, which in turn leads to Michael getting involved and his Start of Darkness and all the pain and grief he experienced throughout the trilogy as he fell from grace.
  • It's revealed that Sonny is the one to invite Carlo to Vito's birthday and thus, introduce Carlo to Connie, setting up their eventual wedding and the Domestic Abuse that soon occurs, which in turn is used to cause Sonny's own death.
  • In Part II, Don Fanucci forcing Genco to fire a young Vito and give Vito's job to a relative is the reason why the Corleones became a family of mobsters instead of a family of grocers.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Admiral William Stenz has a more minor role in this film than in his first appearance, but by firing the Oxygen Destroyer, he and the military are directly responsible for seemingly killing Godzilla, and enabling Ghidorah to take over control of the other Titans and unleash its Apocalypse Wow on the planet. Especially relevant when considering the director's suggestion that Godzilla would've beaten Ghidorah if not for the military intervention.
• Hatched: When some scientists found a dinosaur fossil, they decided to have it sent to Simon for study. By then, Simon had been heavily into researching DNA, to the point he'd already cloned his dead son back to life. By that point, he got it into his head to try a hand at creating dinosaurs. Cue the events of the movie.
• A Haunting in Venice:
  • Leopold's blackmail of Rowena results in Rowena almost killing Poirot and actually murdering two people, including Leopold's father who the latter had suspected was the real blackmailer.
  • The entire plot started because Olga unwittingly overdosed Alicia with poisoned honey.
  • Ariadne and Vitale feed Reynolds inside knowledge of Alicia's death which would convince Rowena that Reynolds was the blackmailer leading to Reynolds's murder.
• I Drink Your Blood: The younger brother of a rape victim laces several pies with the rabies virus, and these pies are eaten by the rapists, who then turn into zombies.
• It! The Terror from Beyond Space: Calder dumped some empty crates and other assorted trash on Mars and forgot to close the rocket's airlock up until it was almost time to launch — which was a long enough time for the alien that killed (almost) every member of the Challenger 141 to get inside the Challenger 142 and continue its rampage with fresh victims.
• In Jaws, if Mr. Kintner did not allow his son Alex to return into water for a last time before returning home, Alex would not have been killed by a great white shark in a gruesome pool of blood.
• The Killer That Stalked New York, a 1950 film Very Loosely Based on the 1947 New York City smallpox outbreak, has Patient Zero Sheila Bennet, who spreads smallpox to several people — thus starting an outbreak — without even knowing that she has contracted the disease herself.
• In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, at least in the film version, Faramir is one. He is prepared to shoot and kill Sméagol for entering the Forbidden Pool and seemingly allows Frodo to call him out of the pool, but immediately captures him upon his exit. Sméagol thinks Frodo lied to him and, enraged by this apparent betrayal, regresses into his Gollum persona and starts plotting his and Sam's deaths for the sake of retrieving the Ring. In the director's cut, the honor goes to Sam: he spends the whole movie antagonizing Sméagol, so when he tries to explain to him at the end that his capture was not Frodo's decision, Sméagol is quite obviously unconvinced.
  • Ultimately, however, this is subverted in both the book and the movie. Sméagol's survival and later interference at Mount Doom is the only reason the One Ring ever gets destroyed at all. If Faramir had ended him back then, Frodo would have taken the Ring for himself for as long as that might have lasted. As depicted in both the book and the film, the moment Frodo put the Ring on was the moment Sauron and the Nazgûl knew where he was; and as they can see him even when with the Ring on, they'd have killed him and delivered it to the Dark Lord himself. In the end, the mercy of Bilbo, Frodo, and Faramir ends up determining the fate of Middle-Earth.

M-Z

• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Scarlet Witch is so hellbent on getting back at Tony for creating weapons that killed her parents that she hexes him with a nightmare vision that shows all of his friends and allies dead and Earth taken over by aliens. Terrifed that the Avengers would not always be able to succeed, Tony creates Ultron to help with peacekeeping. As soon as he does though, Ultron quickly turns against him. This results in Sokovia's destruction, her brother Quicksilver being killed in action and, much later, the fall out of the Avengers.
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 the Ravagers are enraged when Yondu chooses a lesser payday rather than betray Quill. Kraglin chooses this time to vent his frustration about Yondu playing favorites. Taserface, who has expressed a desire to mutiny in an earlier scene, decides to carry out his coup now that he thinks that he has Kraglin's support. Kraglin can only watch as Yondu's other loyalists are all spaced.
  Kraglin: I didn't mean to do a mutiny. They killed all my friends.
  • In Black Panther (2018), T'Chaka, then the Black Panther, confronts his brother N'Jobu about his involvement with Klaue's theft of the vibranium, which T'Chaka learned about from his informant Zuri. When N'Jobu tries to kill Zuri, T'Chaka is then forced to kill N'Jobu. Both T'Chaka and Zuri then return to Wakanda, leaving behind N'Jobu's orphaned son Erik... who eventually becomes the villain Killmonger, who seeks to achieve what his father set out to do.
  • So, so many in Avengers: Infinity War. Among them: Earth wouldn't have been so vulnerable to Thanos if Rogers and Tony had not torn apart the Avengers; Tony deciding not to return to Earth when he had control of Ebony Maw's ship bringing the Time Stone within Thanos's reach instead of returning to Earth to cement its defenses, Thanos wouldn't have the Time Stone if Star-Lord hadn't ruined his own plan in a fit of grief and rage after discovering that Thanos killed Gamora; and Gamora wouldn't be dead in the first place if Nebula hadn't tried to kill Thanos, causing a chain of events that leads to Gamora being sacrificed for the Soul Stone.
  • Ultimately, this all falls back on one Baron Helmut Zemo. He successfully managed to break up the Avengers, hoping to bring down the most powerful team of beings in the universe to avenge the deaths of his family. Unfortunately for him, it worked a little too well, as they don't stand on a united front when Thanos arrives and, despite putting up a good fight, get flattened by the Mad Titan. Said Mad Titan then uses the Infinity Stones to wipe out half of all life in the universe, turning the world into a total mess that it spends five years trying to recover from until the Avengers find a way to set things right. Even when they do undo the Snap, the world falls into utter chaos once again trying to handle those that were restored to life, leading to the Flag-Smashers taking rise and causing just enough trouble to force Bucky and Sam to bust Zemo out of jail to help them.
  • The MIT admissions board in Spider-Man: No Way Home. By deciding to reject Peter Parker, Michelle "M.J." Jones-Watson and Ned Leeds due to the "controversy" related to the first being Spider-Man and the latter two being his accomplices, they provided Peter with the final push to go to Dr. Strange and ask him to cast a spell to make everyone forget about Spider-Man. The spell goes wrong, resulting in people who know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man coming into the universe, and while catastrophe is averted due to Peter having Strange cast another spell to make everyone forget about Peter Parker, the effects are by no means gone. All this because MIT rejected three otherwise promising students for the wrong reasons.
• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie: The construction workers who find the chamber in which Ivan Ooze's egg was kept in, resulting in Zedd finding said egg and unleashing Ivan upon the planet.
• In Mirror Mirror (1990), Emelin and Mrs. Perlili unknowingly release the Sealed Evil in a Can when they break into the sealed closet and remove the black cloth from the mirror while cleaning out the Weatherford house so the new occupants can move in.
• Evey in The Mummy (1999) merely was curious about what was in the Book of the Dead. Little did she know that reading aloud from the first page would resurrect Imhotep and bring about the ten plagues of Egypt. This is lampshaded in the sequel where Evey wants to open a sacred chest and Rick reminds her of what happened when she read the book.
• In A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Elaine Parker not only was responsible for her daughter Kristen's death (she put sleeping pills in Kristen's drink), but thanks to that happening it gave Freddy the opportunity he needed to successfully establish a link to the rest of Springwood's teen populace. So basically every death from this movie onward is because of her. Nice job, Elaine.
  • The parents of the Elm Street series are this as a whole, as are the cops. Everyone was so desperate in catching the child killer that someone forgot to sign the warrant for his arrest, leading Freddy to be released from prosecution almost immediately. Enraged, the parents chased Freddy to the boiler chamber where he killed his victims and set the place on fire with him still inside. To their credit, they had no idea that doing that would turn him into something much worse than a child-killer.
• Phantasm: By creating his dimensional gate, Jebediah Morningside inadvertently ended up giving the interdimensional being that would become the Tall Man a "skinsack" and a way to access our world, leading to the events of the series.
• As pointed out by the scriptwriters in the Audio Commentary of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the entire plot is basically kicked off by Elizabeth Swann's maid pulling her corset too tightly, causing her to fall into the water, causing the cursed coin she's also wearing to summon the undead pirates to Port Royal and capture her, setting off the rescue mission by the other two main characters, Capt. Jack Sparrow and Will Turner, that makes up most of the plot.
• Cadet Fackler from Police Academy is given an apple by his partner while they're on patrol. He tosses it over his shoulder and hits a tough guy in the back of the head. This starts a chain reaction which eventually results in a riot. In the following scene, he tells Hooks and Thompson about the riot. He firmly establishes his status as this when they ask him what caused the riot and he replies "Who knows how these things get started?"
• In Pulp Fiction, Vincent Vega causes a string of bad events in the latter-third (chronological) events of the film. After Butch Coolidge initially agrees to take a dive for Marcellus Wallace so that the latter can win big on a bet, Vincent insults him upon first meeting him, calling him a "palooka" (a fighter who isn't any good). The mere act of Vincent calling him this leads Butch to decide to win the fight instead, causing a chain of bad events, including Butch's opponent dying from the beating he gave him, Vincent getting gunned down by Butch after the former went to the washroom while staking out his apartment, Butch and Marcellus getting captured, the latter getting raped, and Butch being forced to leave L.A. forever after saving Marcellus' life.
• The first Pumpkinhead movie's chain of events is started by Bunt Wallace, a backwoods teen who offers to tell Ed where to find the witch that can summon the eponymous demon simply because he wants to see if it's actually real. When he learns the full scope of what he'd done, he's rightly horrified.
• In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, his blind manservant Duncan gallops into Sherwood Forest in order to tell his master that Marian has been captured by the Sheriff; only for the bad guys to follow him straight to the outlaws' hideaway and start to massacre everyone there. Beyond getting ushered about by either Robin or Marian, it's the only thing he ever does in the movie.
• Safer at Home: A group is having an online birthday celebration for one of its members. Another one, Oliver, sends the others a package with party favors representing the Las Vegas trip they have not been able to take because of the COVID-19 Pandemic lockdown, plus molly that according to him, was manufactured in Japan and may or may not be pure. Despite the hesitance of a few, they all take it. Thanks to the drugs, the group members' judgement is impaired, leading to a firm grasp of the Idiot Ball.
• Saw:
  • Cecil Adams is the reason why John Kramer, the Jigsaw Killer, is dead-set on testing people's lives.
  • In a similar vein, if William Easton had insured John on his experimental treatment instead of denying his coverage, then he'd still live and not kill anyone...
  • ...which he wouldn't have needed to do if Logan Nelson hadn't accidentally mislabeled John's cranial X-ray, preventing his cancer from being caught earlier.
  • If one were to look at the bigger picture of the franchise and its timeline, they would see that if Eric Matthews hadn't sent Amanda to jail for a crime she didn't commit, she wouldn't have become a heroin addict while inside; thus she would never have told Cecil to rob Jill's clinic, which was the first incident for Jigsaw's Start of Darkness. So if you think about it, if Eric hadn't been such a corrupt piece of shit, most of the franchise's events may have never happened.
  • In Saw V Seth Baxter murdering Mark Hoffman's sister is what led Hoffman to take matters into his own hands and murder Seth with a mock Jigsaw trap in a fit of rage after Baxter is released after 5 years into what was supposed to be a life sentence due to an unexplained legal technicality. This catches the attention of Kramer, who then blackmails Hoffman into getting involved with him. Hoffman goes on to kill many, many people and has the highest kill out of the entire franchise.
  • A deleted scene of Saw 3D shows that Cale was the one who suggested Bobby Dagen to pretend to be a Jigsaw survivor, thus kickstarting the movie's main game.
  • Edgar Munsen's murder of Logan's wife is a main motivating factor to why Logan decides to take up the then-dormant mantle of Jigsaw in Jigsaw.
  • William Schenk would never have become a serial killer and killed Pete Dunleavy if Pete himself hadn't murdered Schenk's father in front of him.
• Scream:
  • In the third film, it's revealed John Milton raped Maureen Roberts, conceiving a child named Roman and traumatizing Maureen into promiscuous behavior. Years later, Roman was rejected by Maureen and started filming her trysts, including one with Billy Loomis' father. Roman showed Billy the footage, persuaded him to recruit an accomplice (Stu Macher) and murder Maureen, setting off the first of six mass murder sprees, including one perpetrated by Roman where Milton himself was killed.
  • In the fifth film, Rian Johnson ends up making the 8th "Stab" installment, which meets... negative critical and fandom reception. So much so that a pair of Loony Fans kill 6 people in an attempt to bring the franchise back to its former glory and their deaths in turn spawn another murder spree.
• A Simple Favor: Emily winds up murdering her twin sister and faking her own death so she and her family can get the insurance money that would come from it — four million dollars. This would be enough to get the family out of debt, and solve a lot of problems... but, needless to say, things quickly go haywire, kickstarting all the drama in the main plot. And the cause of all this trouble? A perfectly innocent comment by Emily's friend Stephanie, who says that she's relieved her husband had life insurance, because otherwise she wouldn't have been able to care for her son after he died.
• Sleepaway Camp:
  • Craig and Mary-Ann, the two teens in the opening who accidentally cause the boating accident that kills most of the Baker family and kicks off the entire franchise.
  • A less innocent example would be Aunt Martha. True, her forcing Peter to adopt the identity of his dead sister was horrifying and abusive but she probably didn't expect it to escalate to serial murder.
• Star Wars:
  • In A New Hope, the Star Destroyer officer who orders his subordinate not to fire on the escape pod containing C-3PO and R2-D2, thus ensuring that Luke Skywalker gets Princess Leia's message and brings about the end of the Empire. If this nameless officer had not been so frugal with laser ammo, The Dark Side would surely have triumphed.
  • In Attack of the Clones, the one thing that Jar Jar actually does in the movie, other than stand in the background, is to make a motion in the Senate to grant Palpatine Emergency Authority. Yes, that Palpatine. Jar Jar was already so despised at this point that the reaction was mostly along the lines of "He was the cause of all the evil in the universe? I knew it!" In the Continuity Reboot, he ended up becoming Hated by All as a result of this and exiled by his people.
  • Obi-Wan Kenobi helped start and end the Clone Wars, as he was led by Darth Sidious to discover the clone army he prepared for them so Order 66 could take place.
  • If Admiral Ozzel in The Empire Strikes Back hadn't been so impetuous and exited hyperspace too close to Hoth, the Rebels wouldn't have had time to set up the shield generator and the Imperial fleet could have just bombed them from orbit. This leads to the trope namer for You Have Failed Me.
  • Wicket in Return of the Jedi is the only reason the Rebels won. If he didn't pull a Big Damn Heroes moment by bringing an army of Ewoks to fight the Imperials, the Rebels would never have destroyed the shield generator and never would have destroyed the second Death Star. The Rebels only met the Ewoks at all because of a Scout Trooper who knocked Leia off of her speeder bike, leading to her befriending them while the others searched for her. If he had aimed a little higher, none of the above would have happened (how appropriate that the Empire's downfall is ultimately caused by the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy).
  • Darth Vader is the instigator of his own doom (or salvation). If he hadn't finished that protocol droid he had started in The Phantom Menace, things could have been very different. One possible unfolding: R2-D2 would have never been sold to the Lars family without C-3P0's endorsement, thus R2 stays with the Jawas, R2 gets vaporized when the detachment of Stormtroopers find the sandcrawler, and Leia's message never reaches Obi-Wan.
• Valentine: Dorothy Wheeler falsely accused Jeremy Melton of sexual assault, which is corroborated by three of her friends and Jeremy is sent to reform school and a mental institution. 13 years later, Jeremy has returned, intent on murdering Dorothy and her friends (bar one Token Good Teammate) for framing him. The icing on the cake is that the last victim is Dorothy herself, who Jeremy pins all his crimes on.
• The Shirley MacLaine comedy What a Way to Go! could alternately have been titled Unwitting Instigator Of Doom: The Movie, with MacLaine's character being widowed four times after her entirely well-meaning suggestions inevitably, relentlessly, snowball into her current husband getting killed in some bizarre fashion.
• In Wish Upon, Claire's father finds the music box in the garbage at the old estate and gives it to his daughter as a gift. A nice and thoughtful gesture to be sure, but in doing so, he unknowingly unleashes all of the carnage that is to follow.
• In Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings, a prequel to the Wrong Turn series, one of the characters beg someone not to kill the inbreeds. They spare their life, but in return are responsible for nearly every single death in the films.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: Mystique's plan was simply to avenge a number of dead mutants by murdering the man who had abducted them and experimented with their corpses. That man had projects, rejected by the Congress, to build powerful robots to kill mutants. His death proved his point, that mutants were an actual menace, and so his projects were restored and continued. The Sentinels would prove so deadly and effective that they would cause the apocalyptic future seen at the beginning of the story. Of course, Mystique had never intended any of that; all she wanted was plain revenge.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: After mutants became public knowledge in 1973, a cult was formed to worship En Sabah Nur, and Agent Moira MacTaggert's investigation inadvertently awakens him because his followers always cover up the entrance to his resting place, but she had left it exposed to sunlight, which reanimates him.

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