Everybody Dies Ending / Live-Action Films

Examples of "Everybody Dies" Ending in live-action films.

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• The Alien franchise in general seems to enjoy outright slaughtering its characters. Alien³ picks off 2 of the survivors from the previous movie in the first 5 minutes, kills another survivor partway through, and kills Ripley at the end. Out of all the other characters present throughout the movie, only 2 survive, one presumed dead throughout the film and is only even given a small cameo in the film itself.
• Those who do not die onscreen in the cult French Resistance movie Army of Shadows are killed off in the epilogue screen titles.
• Zigzagged in Avengers: Infinity War, where many of the main characters and half of everyone in the whole universe dies as Thanos wins. Even with some recognizable survivors, it's still very depressing.
• Baghead (2023): By the end of the film, every character with a speaking role is dead, apart from Baghead (who may already be dead) and The Solicitor (who may not be human).
• Bataan: The Dwindling Party of American soldiers is killed to a man by the ending, with the sole exception of Sgt. Dane whose death is all but assured as he's swamped by the Japanese army.
• Bedevilled: Not including Hae-won, every named character in the film is dead by the time the credits roll, most of them having been murdered by Bok-nam.
• Nukes from a Soviet sub wipe out the cast of The Bedford Incident in retaliation for the Bedford firing their nukes at the Soviet sub first.
• Beneath the Planet of the Apes ends with the cast getting shot. And then Charlton Heston's dying act is to trigger a gigantic nuke that destroys the entire planet. They still managed three more films, though (with only two main characters, who escaped through Time Travel).
  • These two survivors die in a later movie. Every character from the first two films ends up dead.
  • Oh the irony...Heston actually re-wrote the ending to the script (in which Taylor destroys the entire planet) because he didn't want it to become a Franchise Zombie, and would rather just end it then.
  • Proving that the modern films are not above this trope either, while the unnamed rest of their tribe of apes survives, War for the Planet of the Apes ends with Caesar and his entire family dead except for his youngest son, Cornelius. Rocket, Maurice, Bad Ape and Caesar's daughter-in-law Lake survive, but every other named character (and every human character period) dies except for Nova, with the rest of humanity succumbing to a disease that reduces them to a primal state (as we know they all inevitably will.)
• Blade II: Blade and Whistler are the only named characters left standing.
• The Blair Witch Project. Considering that the whole concept of the movie is "Hey, we found this video camera out in the woods..." why would you expect anything else?
• By the end of Bodyguards and Assassins, there are a grand total of two bodyguards and zero assassins still living. 90% of the surviving cast are people who fit in neither group, and as such didn't spend the last hour of the movie killing each other.
• All the main characters and even side characters are killed off in the ending of Brute Force.
• The Cabin in the Woods has everyone dying at the hands of the Ancient Ones, not just the cast, but every living being on the planet and the planet itself.
• In the ending of Cannibal Holocaust when Monroe meets with the TV Executives one last time, he meets again with the three executives and tells them that he has viewed the final reel and says that it is "offensive, dishonest, and inhuman". He leads the executives into a screening room to view the final reel of the recovered film.
• In Casino Royale (1967), the villain is tricked into eating an explosive pill, which blows up the casino at the end with every main character in it. However, all the good guys are seen in heaven, strumming harps. Even the villain, until "Six of them went to a Heavenly spot, the seventh one is going to a place where it's terribly hot."
• The two Count Yorga movies ends with all the characters either dead or turned into vampires (most of the female cast for the latter).
• Cruel Gun Story: This Yakuza story about an armored car robbery followed by a series of double-crosses ends with everybody dead—every last one of the gangsters, the one gangster's moll, and the two guards in the armored car. The only character who doesn't die is the only one who isn't associated with crime, the protagonist's wheelchair-bound, innocent sister.
• Fitting with the Cube series' deep cynicism and the utter lethality of the eponymous mazes, nearly all characters usually die, either by the cubes or by their own hands. The survival rate in the series' entries is, successively, 1:0:2.
• Dario Argento's films seem to be rather fond of this, killing most of the main cast and rarely ever having a survival count higher than 2.
  • Suspiria (1977) is actually a narrow aversion once the main heroine, Suzy, kills the head witch (Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs), the building starts to collapse, and the moment she leaves, it bursts into flames, supposedly killing every single person within the building except for her. Every single person that had a name and wanted her head that is— it's blink-and-you'll-miss-it, but it's mentioned that one of the teachers took the entire student body aside from her out to the theater, so there was no-one in the building aside from Suzy and the witches.
• In the John Carpenter film Dark Star two out of four crew members are obliterated in a nuclear blast by a malfunctioning bomb that decides there is no point to existence. Ironically, this stems from a crew member trying to convince the bomb not to explode. Now floating around helplessly in space without a ship, one of the two remaining ones is sucked in by a group of asteroids to slowly drift off and die, while the other decides to surf into the nearby planet's atmosphere on a piece of debris to burn up.
• Dead Man. Interestingly, the only death that isn't really seen is that of William, presumably the eponymous "dead man."
• In Dead Snow, the cast is slaughtered one by one during an exceptionally bloody standoff against the Nazi Colonel Herzog and his stiff soldiers. The toughest one survives after figuring out that the Nazis are after a box of stolen gold and presenting it to them. Though when he finally gets back to the car, he discovers he has accidentally brought a gold coin with him. The Colonel appears and offs him shortly afterwards. However, the sequel shows that he managed to fight the Colonel off and escape.
• The last few scenes of The Departed ends up with every main character but one getting shot by each other — then the very last scene has that final main character getting shot by the other main character's boss.
• All eight characters who got a speaking part in The Descent died. At least in the original version, the US got a different ending. In the sequel, featuring the two main characters, everyone dies in an Ass Pull of epic proportions.
• The Dirty Dozen. Eleven of the eponymous group die, and the last is badly injured. The two officers with them both survive, though.
• In the movie Dogville, Nicole Kidman's character takes the name of this trope literally and indeed sends her goons to kill the entire village, except the dog.
• Dragon Blade: The number of surviving major characters can be counted on half a hand. The Hero, and the Action Girl (who surprisingly subverted Vasquez Always Dies). Every other major character, good or evil, is killed off- including The Lancer, the comic relief guys, the child and the main character's girlfriend.
• Employee of the Month (2004): All the conspirators, Dave, Jack, Wendy, Sara, and Eric are killed off before the end credits. Dave kills Jack after revealing he actually hates him, Wendy kills Dave because she's secretly lovers with his fiance Sara, Eric is killed by Sara because he outlived his usefulness, and Wendy and Sara are both killed in a random car accident.
• The Evil Dead (1981) ends with Ash having to kill everyone else in the cabin, before the ending ends up heavily implying that the evil force that has been chasing them throughout the film ends up killing him anyway. (The sequel reveals him to have survived, however.)
• In The Fall, Roy almost ends his story this way, much to Alexandria's horror. Only her confession of love convinces him to allow their avatars to live.
• The Final Destination series. The survivor of the first movie gets killed in the second, and while the survivors of the second one all survive the finale (a Red Shirt bites the dust instead), they are said to be dead at the end of the third one. The third movie decides to not waste time and kills everyone in a somewhat ambiguous ending. The fourth film is even less ambiguous, showing the main characters getting killed by a runaway truck plowing into a cafe, complete with X-ray shots of their bones breaking. The fifth and final installment goes the extra mile with the added twist of having the entire film be a Stealth Prequel, culminating in the surviving characters dying in the airplane disaster that opened the first film!
• Applied In-Universe in the film Formula of Love, where one of Caliostro's servants sing a song with nonsense words, and when asked by some woman what the song means (she presumes it's in Italian), he tells her a tragic story ending with "So in summation, everybody died."
• Found Footage 3D, a mockumentary parody of found-footage horror films, refers to this as the first rule of found footage, chiefly as the justification for the "found" part — nobody was left alive to bring it back, and it was only recovered later by the search party. The film that the main characters are shooting, Spectre of Death 3D, plays this straight; the fact that Derek is trying to rewrite the script so that his character lives in the end is a sign of his growing diva behavior. True to form, the film itself plays this straight, too, with Amy lampshading the "first rule" just as her Demonic Possession kicks back in and she kills Mark.
• Subverted in Galaxy Quest, where a Kill 'em All ending is Ret-Gone. (And just before the literal reset button gets pushed, the Plucky Comic Relief character is shown to still be alive even as the villain has gunned everybody else down..)
• In G.I. Joe: Retaliation the original cast is reduced to just Duke and Snake Eyes (plus President Zartan and Storm Shadow in the Cobra side) by killing them in The Purge. And even then, Duke's one of the casualties.
• The Grey is about a small group of Alaskan oil workers who get caught in a plane crash on the way to Anchorage, and have to both survive the wilderness and fend off attacks by wolves. Eventually, they all die, except for the protagonist who may or may not survive.
• Guyana: Crime of the Century: Lee O'Brien and the news reporters who were traveling with him get gunned down in Port Kaituma, and all inhabitants in the problematic commune of Johnsontown are forced to commit suicide. Even Susan Ames and her children fail to escape death despite being in Georgetown, since they're murdered.
• Halloween:
  • Zombie's Halloween II (2009) has everyone die...including Dr. Loomis, Michael Myers, and Laurie!
  • Halloween Kills kills off nearly everyone except for Laurie, Deputy Hawkins (who is ironically thought to be dead in the previous film), Allyson, and Lindsey.
• The Head Hunter (2019) ends with only one character surviving, The Head the main character spent so much time trying to kill.
• In Hell in the Pacific, the American soldier and the Japanese soldier seem to be about to turn on each other- and then a bomb kills them.
• Assuming that the explosion in the lab killed everyone present (and that was certainly Lucinda's intent), then every character in Hell's Highway is dead by the end of it.
• The 2009 French zombie movie The Horde ends with only 1 survivor left standing, possibly 0 as you can hear the zombies approaching before the credits roll.
• Everybody dies at the end of Hot Spur. All of O'Hare's men have been killed by Carlo. Carlo is killed by O'Hare. O'Hare gets stabbed to death by his wife Susan in a case of mistaken identity. Susan then kills herself.
• The Iron Mask kills off almost all the characters by the end — all three of The Three Musketeers, their boon companion D'Artagnan, D'Artagnan's girlfriend Constance, Cardinal Richielieu, main bad guy Count de Rochefort, and associate bad girl Milady de Winter. Practically the only main characters left alive at the end are King Louis XIV and his Evil Twin usurper brother Phillipe.
• Played for laughs in one bad ending of Kimmy vs. The Reverend. If you choose to take Jacqueline instead of Titus, Jacqueline has Buckley fly them to Indiana (he's not really a pilot, but they said he was on a college application so she needs photographic evidence).. Buckley doesn't know how to fly, so the plane crashes and they all die. Meanwhile, Titus goes to the gym and gets fatally thrown off of a treadmill. Bobby Durst then comes out and gleefully informs you that you killed them all before you are sent back to try again.
• King of New York: Every notable character ends up dying, including Frank's entire gang, the police detectives trying to catch him, and even Frank himself.
• The Lighthouse has two characters, and both of them are either dead, or on the verge of death, by the film's end.
• Logan kills off every adult of significance, including the title character. The only ones who survive are Laura and the rest of the X-23 kids.
• The Menu ends with every main, supporting, and background character all set on fire by Chef Julian Slowik, including Slowik himself. Margot is the Sole Survivor, given that she was released from his restaurant before he set it ablaze.
• In Merrick: I'll Spew On Your Grave, there is nobody who manages to survive the movie, including the ten-year-old kid.
• At the end of Mile 22, all of the team is dead except for Silva and Bishop. Alice's fate is unknown.
• By the end of Miracle At St Anna, with the exception of Hector and Angelo, every single villager and Allied soldier in St. Anna is killed during a battle with German soldiers.
  • Which makes sense, because the real massacre of Sant'Anna di Stazzema [1] resulted in 560 people being killed, even though the intrusion of american soldiers is completely fictional and there was no battle. It was, quite simply (and sadly), a huge massacre of innocent civilians. The place now is pretty much a ghost town.
• The Mission might well be one of the most depressing cases of this, as it ends with every single one of the protagonists getting massacred by the Portuguese soldiers, and out of a tribe they'd been trying to help, only a handful of women and children make it out alive. Worse still, the men responsible for the massacre get away with it.
• By the end of Morgan, the only named character that's still alive is Lee Weathers, mainly because she's an Artificial Human.
• During the movie "Glory" the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts are charging the Confederate held position called Fort Wagner. They overrun the outer defenses...And then the Confederates fire cannons directly into the renaming protagonists, killing them all and a good chuck of the rest of the regiment.
• In the Spanish movie Nicotina every single person that is plot pertinent dies. Actually, even that ones that aren't important ended up dying, since the whole building explodes.
• The only survivor in Night of the Living Dead (1968) is mistaken for a zombie and shot in the head.
• The Scottish film Outpost has a squad of mercenaries and their scientist/corporate employer wiped out by undead Nazi super-soldiers. The end of the movie leads the viewer to believe that a second team was wiped out the same way.
• The Perfect Storm: Nobody survives that fateful boating trip.
• By the end of Play Dirty, there is only one member of the unit who is not confirmed to be dead. And since he's lying helpless in a truck that nobody living knows the location of with a serious gut wound, the best one can say of that man is that at the end of the movie he might not be dead yet.
• Quarantine (2008): There's a few Hope Spots, in particular one close to the end when the landlord says there's a way to get out through the basement, but really. What really sells it is that most characters who die pop back up as (let's just say) zombies, and near the end there's a sequence where the two leads have to fight through what's left of the rest of the cast.
• Quentin Tarantino seems to be a fan of doing this.
  • Reservoir Dogs ends with just about the entire crew dead except for Mr. Pink, who either gets caught by the cops during the ending credits or is shot to death.
  • Kill Bill: Before killing the titular Bill, the Bride mows her way through over one hundred enemies. Anyone related to her past is given the same treatment, either by her or by other hands.
  • The first half of Death Proof does this right by killing the 5 women we got to know for the first 30 minutes. It's then subverted in the second half.
  • In Inglourious Basterds, every character except Col. Landa and two Basterds are killed off, including an entire movie theatre full of Nazis.
  • No one except for Django and his wife ever make it to the end of Django Unchained.
  • By the end of The Hateful Eight, all but two characters are dead, and the two who survive are bleeding out on a bed, implied to die there since they're in the midst of a blizzard and no one knows they're there.
• The Akira Kurosawa film Ran — not surprising since the plot closely resembles that of King Lear, with a bonus Cycle of Revenge element thrown in for good measure.
• In a similar vein, Miklos Jancso's The Red and the White (1967), set during the Russian Civil War. It doesn't have too many real characters, but pretty much every recognizable person — Bolshevik, White, Hungarian, Russian, man or woman — is killed at some point. Especially the Downer Ending, where an entire Bolshevik company dies in a suicidal bayonet charge.
• The Return of the Living Dead, where everyone who hadn't already been killed by the undead were nuked by the U.S. Army. The film's only survivors are a couple of voices at the other end of a phone call because they're the ones who called in the nuclear strike.
• Rocketship X-M features a bunch of people going to the moon, but ending up on Mars. They are able to find about people that are horribly mutated from a war and on the way back, and only have enough time tell the people of Earth about this, before a leak makes them run out of gas on the way home and they are unable to land. As Crow put it on Mystery Science Theater 3000, "There's nothing more depressing then being stuck in a spaceship, watching people die in a spaceship."
• In the Saw franchise, almost no major or supporting character has survived throughout all the nine movies, not even Jigsaw himself. Lawrence Gordon is one of the few exceptions, but he didn't appear after the first movie until the seventh one, so he only appeared in two films anyway.
• Scarface (1983) ends with Tony Montana and crew dead and the drug lord who ordered the film-ending attack still alive. Fortunately or not, you don't get to see his presumable satisfaction with this. The video game depicting an alternative take on the film picks up after Tony's 'death' and has the player control him as he attempts to rebuild his drug empire. This can be viewed as an alternate continuity.
• By the end of the first Scary Movie, everyone except for Cindy's father, Sherriff Gale, and Doofy (who's the bad guy) are killed. Many of said characters inexplicably come Back from the Dead in the sequels.
• In Season of the Witch, everyone (except for an altar boy/Knight Wannabe and a girl that was possessed by a demon) dies rather horrible deaths.
• Shrooms: Tara is the only main character to survive. Ernie also survives, but, unfortunately for him, he is falsely arrested for the murders.
• The Sidehackers was a brutal, gritty biker film in which almost every character (including the hero's extremely likable love interest, whose death Mystery Science Theater 3000 had to cut out of the aired version and have Crow explain) was gang raped and killed. The hero himself was gunned down by the fatally wounded villain whilst walking away from a Mexican Standoff. The three that lived (the black guy, the guy who told bad jokes, and the hero's friend) all ran off when the battle was in progress. Sidehackers incidentally, was the movie which prompted Best Brains to institute their policy of watching a movie all the way through before selecting it for their show.
• In Silent Running, the protagonist murders his crew mates in order to save the last forest from being destroyed, then eventually commits suicide to prevent a rescue mission from discovering the truth. Only a single robot (of the original three) is left "alive" to care for the plants.
• Star Wars
  • In Revenge of the Sith almost every named character that wasn't present in the original trilogy winds up dead by the end of the movie. Thanks to their Doomed by Canon status Count Dooku, General Grievous, Mace Windu, Nute Gunray, and Padmé all die along with the Separatist Leadership and nearly all of the Jedi Order.
  • In Rogue One, all the newly introduced characters, with the possible exception of General Draven, who is never seen leaving Yavin to participate in the climactic battle, are killed getting the Death Star plans to the Rebel fleet. In fact, the only character on the poster who survives is Darth Vader.
• Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning ends with everybody dying in the massive P-Fleet vs Babel 13 space battle. A few survive, though, and Earth is freed from Emperor Pirk's tyranny.
• The entire crew of the Icarus II dies in the sci-fi movie Sunshine (2007), but they do manage to save the world in the process. It is hinted that Kappa might not die, but is frozen in time right before his death, stuck admiring a wall of fire. In all probability, he died.
• By the end of Sushi Girl, a grand total of one plot-pertinent character is left standing. The eponymous one, to be specific.
• The credits of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance start rolling when all characters are dead except one, who is fatally wounded. As the screen fades to black, you continue to hear his mumbling and moaning as he slowly bleeds out due to having his gut sliced to ribbons. At the end of the credits, he is still not dead.
• In the Tales from the Crypt movie Demon Knight only Jeryline the hotel manager's niece survives the Collector and his minion's attack.
  • Likewise in its sequel Bordello of Blood, the only two surviving people are Rafe and Catherine Then Catherine reveals she was bitten and turned by Lilith before going for Rafe's neck.
• The Thing (1982) ends with nearly everyone dead. There are, at most, two human characters still alive, and they're doomed to freeze to death if indeed they are human. All the other men and all the dogs are killed; as for the Thing itself, there's really no way at all to be sure if it's dead for good, or if anyone else will be stupid enough to defrost it again if it's not.
• Over the course of the last half hour of 13 Assassins, eleven of the thirteen assassins die (with no real explanation for how one of them survived his wounds), taking their target and his two hundred man security detail with him. Apart from the two surviving assassins, the only major character left alive is the official who commissioned the assassination in the first place, whose survival stemmed from not being an active participant in the plot after setting it in motion, and thus not being in danger.
• In Uwe Boll's Tunnel Rats, only two soldiers survive the Viet Cong massacre of their camp...only to be killed when the Air Force levels the place. A third soldier that had nearly escaped the VC's labyrinth of tunnels was buried alive and slowly suffocated.
• United 93 is Based on a True Story involving a plane crash that had no survivors, As a result, in this film, nobody got off of United 93 alive once it was in the air. While the plane is shown descending straight for the ground, there's a Smash to Black the moment before the plane crashes. Instead, there's an ending card that says that no one survived the impact.
• Up Pompeii ends with the destruction of Pompeii which kills the entire cast, although Lurcio is implied to have lived and had children by the epilogue.
• Valkyrie ends with the deaths of virtually all of the major conspirators who organized the botched July 20th assassination attempt on Hitler. It's not like the screenwriter had a choice.
• Village of the Damned:
  • In John Carpenter's Village of the Damned (1995) with Christopher Reeve, only the teacher girl and her kid (the only alien child who had more or less normal emotions) survive. Everyone else in town is dead.
  • A subversion of the original story (The Midwich Cuckoos and the original Village of the Damned movie) in which none of the kids had human emotions. They all died along with the teacher responsible for their deaths, but almost everybody else they hadn't "influenced" survived.
• By the end of The Wages of Fear, Luigi, Bimba, Jo, and Mario himself were killed in the job, and Bernado has committed suicide.
• The Wild Bunch. Anti-heroes. Anti-villains. Villains. Bystanders. Livestock. Only two named characters are still breathing as the closing credits roll.
• German World War II movies often end with most if not all of the characters dying to emphasize the horrors of the war:
  • In Das Boot, just as the eponymous submarine returns home and the crew is greeted by the cheering people the air raid siren sounds and Allied aircraft attack the harbour, sinking the sub and killing all aboard but three people (Werner and the Chief both manage to survive the air raid, and there was that one guy who got rushed to the hospital just before it happened). This is actually an anti-war subversion, the U96 and all her crew returned safely home (U96 was considered a lucky boat in that none of her crew was killed). Her captain Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock went on to captain Germany`s first and only nuclear powered freighter. So although the book/film (based on the real crew) had a downer ending, Real Life did not.
  • In Stalingrad (1993), only 3 characters are alive near the end, and then a Russian sniper kills one of them, and the last two take cover and slowly freeze to death in the snow. As the two stop moving and are slowly covered by the falling snow, the credits roll. If one pays attention to how the movie focuses on smaller and smaller groups of soldiers (from full regiments to single characters) it can be said that this trope is exactly what this movie is about. Only one of the soldiers, Rollo, doesn't die onscreen, but after he witnesses the remaining German soldiers surrender, it's ambiguous whether or not he joined them. If he did, his chances would be slim anyway.
  • In the 1959 film Die Brücke (The Bridge), set near the end of the war, a group of seven fanaticized teenagers try to defend a (strategically unimportant) local bridge from the approaching Americans. They succeed, but all die in the fight, except one.
• Russian war movies about WW2, while being somewhat more upbeat, also include this:
  • A Russian war movie The Crossing (not to mix with the USA film) depicts a Soviet anti-tank platoon, which is retreating toward the eponymous crossing, where the Soviet troops are regrouping. They travel one whole day towards the crossing, then on the dawn of the next day they are attacked by a German armored troop, and are wiped out, without managing to inflict any (serious) damage to the enemy. A tragic and pointless end.
  • Similarly, the Based on a True Story film The Brest Fortress. The whole garrison is ultimately killed, with exception of a few captured soldiers. However, the casualties they inflicted on the enemy were horrendous.
  • I am a Russian Soldier, also being based on the Brest Fortress siege, understandably has a similar ending.
  • The Commander's Daughter, also being based on the Brest Fortress siege, also pulls this off. All the protagonists die except for the eponymous heroine; her survival, however, is of the I Died variety, as we see the enemy killing everyone. This is Truth in Television, however, as both her prototypes survived the war.
  • In the Russian film Zvezda (The Star), the eponymous scout unit is eventually cornered, shot, and flamethrowered to death by SS and Wehrmacht troopers. The captain who sent their team out narrates the result of their sacrifice, then mentions that he also died later in the war.
  • In a similar vein, Norwegian war movie We Leave for England(and also the book preceding it), has every male character (Norwegians, not Germans), executed off-screen at the end of the film.
• These Final Hours depicts an ensuing firestorm approaching Australia after a meteor struck the Earth in the North Atlantic, and unlike other films where the meteor impact obliterates all life in an instant, it takes 12 hours just for the firestorm to approach Australia. That being said, all the characters (and the extent life on Earth) are incinerated when the 12 hours were up.

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