Not Good With Rejection / Live-Action Films

People who are Not Good with Rejection in Live-Action Films.

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By Studio/Creator:

• Most of Lifetime's movies feature some form of this. Whenever a character has their feelings rejected, they will either try to ruin their loved one's lives, use threats against them, attempt or successfully kill someone close to them, or all three.

By Title:

• In Akunin, when the Villain Protagonist Shimizu's girlfriend stands him up to go off with another guy, Shimizu follows them and kills her.
• Astro (2018): If Alexander Biggs makes you an offer, and you decide to turn him down, he'll just make you do what he wants by force.
• Audition: Asami, a woman who was auditioning to be Aoyama's wife and is happy about his declarations of love to her, goes to Aoyama's house and discovers a photo of his late wife. Enraged, she drugs his liquor. Aoyama collapses from the drug. Asami injects him with a paralytic agent that leaves his nerves alert and tortures him with needles. She tells him that, just like everyone else in her life, he has failed to love only her. She cannot tolerate his feelings for anyone else, even his own son. She inserts needles into his eyes, giggling as she does so. She then cuts off his left foot with piano wire. Shigehiko returns home as Asami begins to cut off Aoyama's other foot, and they struggle.
• In Back to the Future, Biff frequently makes unwanted advances on Lorraine and becomes very angry when she rejects him, tries to rape her in 1955, and wants to marry her (he eventually succeeds in marrying her and treats her horribly). Biff goes so far as to even abuse his adopted children and threatened to put his wife and her children in jail alongside her brother Joey if she ever tried to leave him.
• Bad Education (2004): Father Berenguer tries to blackmail Juan when he refuses to see him.
• Batman & Robin: Dr. Jason Woodrue tries to kill Pamela Isley after she rejects him. He even admits that he doesn't take rejection well.
  • Ironically, Poison Ivy herself has shades of this. When Batman resists her advances on him, she stops trying to flirt with him and just has Bane try to kill him. Later, when Robin reveals he survived her deadly kiss by wearing rubber lips and tricked her into revealing her plan, she angrily pushes him off her throne and into the pond to drown him instead of trying to kiss him again.
• Blue Steel: Wall Street stockbroker Eugene Hunt becomes psychotically obsessed with rookie cop Megan Turner after he witnesses her gunning down an armed robber, and thinks they are soulmates. When she rejects him upon finding out that he's a murderer, he proceeds to kill her friends and anyone else close to her, and eventually rapes her.
• Bruce Almighty: Bruce and Grace, in a sympathetic Tearjerker example. When Grace catches Bruce getting kissed by Susan, she refuses to listen to his explanations and leaves him. She asks God (Bruce has God's powers) to take away her feelings for Bruce because she doesn't want to get hurt anymore. Bruce tries to win Grace back after she dumps him, up to including trying to use his powers to force Grace to love him again despite knowing he can't affect free will. Eventually, they get back together.
• Carol: Harge can't accept getting divorced from Carol, so he blackmails her and threatens to cut off access to their daughter.
• Michael in Click freeze frames his ex-wife Donna and her new husband after she yells at him "I hate you!" and he discovers they're married. He then gives the guy a Groin Attack. He later flips him off and generally hates him but eventually lets him know that he has no hard feelings towards him anymore as he lay dying.
• In the 1944 Boris Karloff movie The Climax, Karloff's character, Dr. Friedrich Hohner, obsessed with a beautiful opera singer, Marcellina (June Vincent), with whom he's been having an affair but who wants to break up with him, strangles her to death. Ten years later, another gorgeous singer (Susanna Foster) whom Hohner has developed an identical obsession with, discovers Marcellina's perfectly-preserved body, which Hohner has kept in a Snow White-like glass-lidded coffin for the past decade.
• Lucille Sharpe from Crimson Peak is very possessive of her lover and brother Thomas. When she finds out that he has fallen for someone else, she flips out and kills him in a fit of rage, then immediately starts sobbing over the deed she did.
• The Crush: Adrian maniacally dices lemons with a knife after seeing Nick and Amy in bed together, and in the film's climax, attacks Nick and her father with a crowbar due to Nick's repeated rejections of her. She also loves Nick so much she's willing to kill his girlfriend and her own friend to get him. Luckily, she doesn't succeed. At the end when she's in a psychiatric hospital she gives up on her crush on Nick and falls for her doctor, giving a picture of him and his wife an evil glare.
• Dark Shadows: After Barnabas rejects her love, Angelique goes on to Murder the Hypotenuse, curse Barnabas to be a vampire, lock him in a coffin for almost 200 years, and spend those consequent 200 years sabotaging his family for revenge.
• Devil in the Flesh:
  • Rose McGowan's character Debbie in the movie goes Yandere for her teacher when it becomes obvious that he already has a wife and doesn't love her back.
  • The guy from Debbie's school who lusted after her tries to rape her after she turns down his sexual advances and later attacks her. She kills him before he can attack/rape her.
• DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story:
  • Gordon has his Berserk Button pressed when he sees his mail-order wife getting friendly with another man. It enables him to get angry enough to take down another dodgeball team all by himself and later divorce his wife.
  • White is furious when Kate rejects him and lays the smackdown on him resulting in him bleeding. He gives her the middle finger and yells at her. It's implied to be part of the reason he hits her while she's down during the match between their teams, partly because he's a dick, partly because he's angry Kate rejected him.
• Ever After:
  • Danielle is revealed to Henry by Rodmilla in front of the entire court to have pretended to be a countess and is actually a servant in her household. When Henry finds out, he rebuffs her, humiliating Danielle and she responds by running out in the rain to cry, ruining her ball gown. The next day when she's working on her chores, she attacks the ground in fury. Also, in a familial sense, when Rodmilla basically tells her she never loved her even a little which is not what Danielle wanted her to say, Danielle washes her hands of her.
  • Rodmilla screams Please, Don't Leave Me to Auguste as he lies dying of a heart attack, but it's more out of selfishness than love, since she's wailing that he "cannot leave [her] here" and basically ignoring his heartbroken young daughter kneeling beside him, and proceeds to be horrible to her for the next ten years. It's implied she's also jealous of the fact that Auguste said his "I love you" to Danielle instead of her.
  • Monsieur le Pieu is implied to be something like a Stalker with a Crush to Danielle, judging by his behavior toward her in the marketplace and then later when he owns her. When she repeatedly rejects him, he warns that she should be careful how she treats him because her farm receives money from his business and he could simply withhold his "generosity" so that her "pathetic little farm would cease to exist". Later, when he owns her, she rebuffs him and threatens to cut him to pieces with a sword. He tells her he will break her like he once did to his stubborn old horse and threatens to have her hanged when she attacks him. However, he gives in and allows her to go to her freedom.
• Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction towards Dan. For example, she threatens suicide when he tries to separate himself from her after their fling.
  "I'm not going to be ignored, Dan!"
• In Fear (1996), Nicole and David end up together and within a couple of weeks, Nicole realizes that David is becoming possessive of her and ultimately breaks up with him. David tries everything to get Nicole back, but when that doesn't work, he and his group of friends break into Nicole's home by holding her and her family hostage, which leads to some nasty consequences.
• Girl with a Pearl Earring:
  • Van Reuiven lusts after Griet to the point of trying to rape her when drunk once when she continues to act indifferent towards him and tries to fight him off.
  • When Johannes decides to paint Griet the family maid whom he has Unresolved Sexual Tension with over Catherina she looks at it as Johannes preferring Griet over her and tries to stab the painting. When Johannes stops her she screams at Griet to get out of her house.
• Horrible Bosses: The Maneater boss regularly sexually harasses Dale. When he rejects her advances, she drugs him and takes sexually explicit photos of him to blackmail him.
• Hot Tub Time Machine: In the original timeline, Jenny stabs Adam in the eye with a fork after he breaks up with her.
• I Shot Jesse James: Robert Ford is this big time. One of the reasons his girlfriend Cynthy doesn't leave him throughout the film is that she's scared of what he'll do. When she finally does at the film's end, Bob tries to kill John Kelley because Cynthy chose him instead of Bob.
• Fredrick Zoller in Inglorious Basterds. In one scene Zoller slips away to the projection room to see Shosanna, who rejects him. As a result, he gets angry and slams the door open. However, his hot temper eventually gets him killed as Shosanna decided to empty her gun into his back so the nuisance would go away.
• In Just Friends when Chris tries to turn down Samantha she tazers him in the groin. Also, Samantha shows up at Jamie's house to start trouble after learning that Chris is kind of dating Jamie. There's also a Running Gag of guys being upset when girls put them in the friend zone. At the beginning when Chris gets rejected by Jamie and mocked by the students at a party, he flees the house on his bike.
• Kill Bill: Bill doesn't take being rejected by The Bride well, and this is the entire reason that the wedding rehearsal massacre that kicks off the saga takes place to begin with. As he says during their final confrontation in Volume 2, "There are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard."
• In Legally Blonde Elle and her boyfriend Warner are eating dinner and Elle is expecting Warner to propose. However, he breaks up with her for not being serious enough, and in response, she has a breakdown in the middle of the restaurant and angrily walks home in the rain but stops and gets in the car when Warner tells her she'll ruin her shoes that way. She also holes herself up in her room eating chocolates. She gets over him though.
• Susanna from Legends of the Fall kills herself after Tristan rejects her.
• It's revealed in Little Miss Sunshine that Frank attempted to commit suicide because of his ex-boyfriend who had left him for an academic rival.
• Mad Max: Fury Road: The comic book prequel Furiosa #1 confirms this, detailing how the wives of Immortan Joe had to put up with invasive and humiliating vaginal examinations performed by a rather pervy OB/GYN (and witnessed by Joe AND his sons), the threat of being raped by Joe's infantile adult son, being forced to stay up all night having sex with Joe, and having to suffer Joe's wrath if they ever dared to object to his sexual advances. When the Splendid Angharad was revealed to be pregnant, the stress of the situation got so bad for her that she attempted to perform an abortion on herself.
• A Million Ways to Die in the West:
  • Albert is initially too depressed to leave the house after Louise rejects him and tries to win her back before giving up on her and choosing Anna.
  • Clinch is much worse, as he's shown to be willing to murder people when he learns his wife Anna kissed another man (Albert) as well as attempt to murder her and later Albert in a case of If I Can't Have You… and Murder the Hypotenuse after Anna rejects and humiliates him.
• Implied in Misery when Annie tries to keep Paul from leaving her but knows he'll want to leave her when his legs get better and then says that she has a gun and she might put bullets in it. She also breaks his legs to keep him from leaving and tells him "God I love you."
• The Duke in Moulin Rouge! tries to rape Satine and threatens to murder her lover unless she comes to him.
• My Super Ex-Girlfriend: On one side there is Matt, a normal guy. On the other side, there is Jenny Johnson AKA G-Girl, a Supergirl Expy. They were an item at first, but then Jenny became more neurotic, aggressive, and controlling. So Matt breaks off the relationship and... she does not take the rejection well. She terrorizes his life, sends his car into orbit, and throws a shark at him.
• The Neon Demon: After Jesse comes to the mansion that Ruby claims to be house-sitting, Ruby tries to initiate sex with her, but is rejected. Upset, Ruby leaves for her second job as a makeup artist for a morgue. There, she pleasures herself with a female corpse while thinking about Jesse and later fatally injures her after pushing her into a pool.
• In the thriller No Way Out (1987), Scott Pritchard, Defense Secretary David Brice's aide, helps him cover up his involvement in the death of his mistress. As the situation devolves, Pritchard becomes increasingly psychopathic until, in the end, it is revealed that he's been harboring an Unrequited Love for Brice. He commits suicide upon being rejected.
• All of Esther's actions in Orphan have in mind the ultimate death of John's family Kate, Danny, AND Max so that she can have John all to herself.
• In P2, Thomas is of the Stalker with a Crush variety, veering into Ax-Crazy. He chooses to kidnap the heroine when she refuses to stay after work and have dinner with him on Christmas Eve.
• The Perfect Assistant has Rachel, an assistant who becomes obsessed with her boss, David. After his wife is sent to the hospital and it's believed that she may die, Rachel rejoices at the prospect of him being available. However, David reveals that his wife will survive, but Rachel proceeds to Murder the Hypotenuse. She tries to come on to David, which leads to him firing her. Her delusional mind makes her believe that he fired her because he didn't want their work relationship to collide with their real "relationship", and he formally denies anything there for them. She responds by grabbing a gun and threatening to shoot him at a business dinner. Even when she's sent to jail for all of her crimes, she writes letters to him, still believing that there is a relationship.
• Simone in The Perfect Girlfriend is this. Anytime a guy she dates breaks up with her, she proceeds to ruin his life by destroying his career. She has a huge Villainous Breakdown when Brandon, her current "boyfriend", breaks up with her and goes back to his girlfriend. In addition to her huge breakdown, she also charges a purchase of wine to his company card, which almost gets him fired. She even did something similar when a previous boyfriend broke up with her in the first few minutes of the movie.
• In The Perfect Teacher, Devon falls hard for her new teacher, Jim. She befriends his young daughter, has fantasies about them having sex (nothing explicit is shown), and breaks into his house using a copy set of his keys. When she hears that Jim is going to move to San Diego because of his ex-wife, Devon kills the ex-wife and tries to confess to him. However, for obvious reasons, Jim rejects her and tries telling her that she just has a crush on him. In response to his rejection, she tells her father that Jim raped her, which nearly costs him his job.
• Play Misty for Me: Dave (Eastwood) is a womanizing DJ who constantly gets calls from a woman asking him to play the song "Misty". He eventually meets the woman, named Evelyn, and has a one-night-stand with her. Evelyn insists on making herself part of Dave's life and, at first, Dave likes the attention. However, his ex-girlfriend, Tobie, moves back to town, and Dave decides to patch things up. After he attempts to tell Evelyn that he's not interested, she responds by attempting suicide. Dave and Tobie get closer, but Evelyn isn't going to take it and tries any way she can to keep Dave to herself, even if it means getting rid of Tobie for good...
• Diego from The Purge: Anarchy seeks revenge against Eva for perceived rejection against him in the past and tries to rape and kill her and her daughter to "purge".
• In Queen of the Damned Akasha develops an attraction to Lestat after being taken with him when he plays the violin for her and allows him to drink her blood. After she wakes up centuries later she murders anyone who might prove a threat to Lestat and kidnaps him at his concert to have him for herself. She also killed her previous husband by ripping out his throat to make herself available, orders Lestat to murder Jesse to prove his love for her and tries to kill him without a second thought when he refuses.
• Rat Race: Tracy goes into psycho mode when she finds her boyfriend cheating on her with his ex. Upon seeing him and his ex in a steamy pool in the backyard, she attempts to nosedive at them in her helicopter and in their haste to avoid it, they break the pool and the water sends them crashing into the side of his house. After that, she proceeds to drop things, including a can of pink paint, onto his truck, and chase him down in the chopper, while using the landing skids to destroy his truck. After running him off the road, she steals the truck upon finding her helicopter's engine is shot. She then yells and punches him in the face after he breaks up with her, almost strangles him with the truck window, puts a bra in his mouth, and throws him out of the already running truck.
• In Scream 4, Trevor told Jill he loved her, they had sex and then he "just goes out with someone else". Jill absolutely refuses to forgive him, no matter how much he tries to apologize. She later shoots Trevor in the groin and then kills him, planning to frame him for her murders and says "I am not the kind of girl you cheat on".
• Sandy Burrow (Joely Fisher) from Seduction In A Small Town is a great example of a Lifetime-like Yandere: when she throws herself at local dad Paul Jenks (Dennis Weaver) and is rebuffed because he's Happily Married to Sarah (Melissa Gilbert), among other things, she gets so pissed that she falsely accuses them both of being horrible abusive parents to their two kids and gets them thrown in jail. Twice.
• Sideways: Stephanie's reaction to learning Jack's getting married in a few days? She pounds his face in with her motorcycle helmet.
• Spider-Man Trilogy:
  • In the first film, Green Goblin feels strongly about Spider-Man and doesn't react well when he rejects his offer to join him.
    Green Goblin: NO ONE SAYS NO TO ME!
  • Occurs in the third film when Mary Jane breaks up with Peter (who was under the influence of the symbiote).
  • In the original novelization of the third movie, Eddie Brock develops stalker-ish qualities after Gwen rejects him.
• Star Wars:
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Kylo Ren develops a Villainous Crush on Rey and offers her a We Can Rule Together choice. She rejects it through her words and her show of force by getting a few hits in. She also slices him across the face with Luke Skywalker's lightsaber and he has a Villainous Breakdown as a result. He can only look on in despair as they are separated by the land physically moving between them and she runs away.
  • Also in Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Kylo Ren's response to Rey rejecting his offer again is to attempt to dissociate himself with her by calling her just "the girl" and threatening to kill her to Luke, although he doesn't really mean it as telling by his last moment with Rey in the movie.
• In Swimfan Madison initially doesn't seem all that upset that her one-time lover Ben has a girlfriend Amy already but then she becomes more unhinged and tries to murder Amy...
• In Titanic (1997), Cal (Rose's fiancé) shoots at Jack and Rose after he sees them reuniting. He later tries to keep Rose from going to Jack after she rejects him with "I'd rather be his (Jack's) whore than your (Cal's) wife!" but Rose spits at him.
• The Watcher: David Allen Griffin kills every girl Joel likes. He first murders Joel's ex-lover because Joel was going to retire to be with her. Then, he tries to kill Joel's female psychologist because she's coming between them. In fact, in the movie, he even comes out and says that he did it because they got in the way of their relationship.
• In Wedding Crashers Sack notices John getting close to his fiancée Claire and reveals that John's been lying to her to get him to leave while brandishing a gun. Later, when John tries to sneak into his and Claire's engagement party, he has his buddies beat him up. He then threatens to kill John if he ever comes near Claire again. When John shows up at their wedding, Sack loses it and tries to attack him. He also gets very angry when Claire tries to leave him at the altar to go with John.

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