Okay, so I am a film buff and have been a massive fan of the recent slew of marvel movies and just watching other properties try and follow and create franchises, my issue with this however is are enough heroes dying? I bring this up because the last two massive universe movies were Batman V Superman and Civilwar, one better then the other we all know what one moving on... In both they seemingly killed off 2 heroes but at the end copped out, I bring this up because I worry movie companies are worried to kill of their main characters due to fan favoritism and the fact that character carries fans, the same thing applies in comics when they don't kill off the main members permanently like The Joker in DC comics. As for games, we are more towards people dying however I feel this trend is going out of fashion, the last game I remember someone killing off the lead was resistance 2 and that's because the guy who killed him became the protagonist. So in all forms of the media I love I worry the reliance on franchise is keeping heroes from dying and this is an issue as it starts to remove suspense and makes stories predictable. So my question for you is do you think the desire to keep characters alive is a problem or do you see it as unimportant, please share your thoughts! Cheerio chaps!
Killing off characters in a story--even the main characters--is not an inherently bad thing. Popular fiction as of late, however, seems to be under the impression that killing a character is automatically good writing because of how much of a ~twist~ it is. The problem is that killing characters for the sake of killing characters or having a twist is pretty poor storytelling. So do heroes need to die? Not necessarily. But sometimes it can work.
It's all contextual. I personally believe that killing characters can be as much a cop-out as leaving them alive. Of course, teasing that you will and not going through of it is probably the worst of both worlds. I don't like characters to die, but I like it a lot less when they tug on my heartstrings like that and don't close out. I can tell you this much: Comic films are always going to be scared to kill off their characters, because comics are. They want the shock value, but they don't want to sacrifice the IP. It makes no sense from a narrative standpoint, but plenty from a sales standpoint (which is not my opinion, just my explanation of the thought process; personally I believe your sales will always tank eventually if you allow that kind of thinking to seep into your work).
The two examples you listed were of characters based off of comic books. The only people who ever stay dead are Uncle Ben and Batman's parents(and even then that's not always true). Sometimes you just can't kill off a main character. Spoiler There is no Justice League without Superman. There just isn't. He's the very essence of it. There's no debate to be had about it. Batman just isn't a shining beacon of hope and justice like Superman is and neither is Wonder Woman. So it's not really a cop out to revives Supes. Unless there's no plans for a Justice League movie. As for any other kind of movie...well, it's hard to kill your hero off in the first movie because generally audiences wouldn't have had enough time invested into said hero to really give a damn if they die. Sometimes, just killing off a hero to have emotional impact is cheap and pointless. There are more interesting things to do than death. Sometimes you can do worse than kill off your hero.
