Movie Moment: Villain Plummeting

You know something that happens a lot in movies? Villains plummet to their deaths.

Think about it. In any movie that has a villain – generally in the genres of action, adventure, or horror* – there tend to be fairly standard ways for villains, both the henchman and boss variety, to come to their ignominious end. And one of those ways is plummeting.

This makes sense, I suppose. If you have a conflict-based story, the audience needs an act of great dramatic finality to signal the end of the conflict. And falling from a great height certainly fits that bill.

Here’s a partial list of movies that feature plummeting as the means of dispatching the bad guy, and the villain who falls. These are often combination deaths – featuring some sort of wound and plummet. The only one on here that I think is recent enough to be a spoiler is “The Dark Knight” - so skip that one if you haven't seen it.

“King Kong” – King Kong (Maybe the First Movie Plummet, and the one by which all others must be judged – also, combo! – shot by bi-planes – but really, ‘twas beauty killed the beast)
“Snow White and Seven Dwarves” – The Evil Queen (combo! – hit by lightning, crushed by boulder!)
“Sleeping Beauty” – Maleficent (combo! – stabbed with sword)
“The Land Before Time” – Sharptooth (the T-Rex – combo! Then the cute dinosaurs push a rock on him!)
“Return of the Jedi” – Emperor Palpatine (Darth Maul doesn’t count – he was already cut in half)
“Cliffhanger” – John Lithgow (combo! – helicopter he’s in blows up!)
“Die Hard” – Hans Gruber (combo – shot!)
“Masters of the Universe” – Skeletor (the live action one – oh yes, I went there)
“Batman” (1989 – Tim Burton) – The Joker
“Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” – Mola Rom (combo! – eaten by crocodiles!)
“Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” – that blonde lady
“Last of the Mohicans” – Magua (combo! – repeatedly stabbed by Chingachgook)
“Beauty and the Beast” – Gaston
"The Mask of Zorro" - Both bad guys plummet (the cart one is tangled on actually falls on the other one, and then they both fall some more)
“James Bond: Goldeneye” – The Main Bad Guy (combo! – crushed by falling antenna!)
“The Dark Knight” – Two-Face

And if you consider being sucked into the eternal void of space “plummeting,” there are several more, most notably the Aliens in “Alien” and “Aliens.”

Sub-genre: Plummeting Into Lava/Molten Metal
"Godzilla" (1985) - Godzilla
“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” – T1000
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” – Frollo
“Alien 3” – Baby Alien (and Ripley, sniff)
“Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” – Gollum

(Frollo and Gollum's demise are straight out of the books.)

This is in no way a complete list, of course. Feel free to share your favorite plummet that I may have forgotten.

As you can tell from the list, Disney villains have a great habit of plummeting, which, as this site points out, is useful because you don’t have to show the body, and it removes the hero from being the person who actually kills the villain.

Other common ways for villains to die are being consumed by cosmic forces, blown to smithereens, electrocuted, crushed to death, or some combination of those. And as much as Disney has used falling, they have also come up with some truly horrifying final fates (thanks Alex!), like being stabbed by a boat (Ursula in “The Little Mermaid”), and being eaten by hyenas after surviving a plummet (Uncle Scar in “The Lion King”). As we said above, these kind of endings provide great dramatic finality, and put the villain – who usually spends the movie trying to exert power over others - up against forces over which they have no control. Plummeting certainly fits that bill, as the force the villain comes face to face with is, well, gravity.

*Interestingly, westerns tend to avoid this kind of thing. Let’s chalk it up to thematic need for one man (or woman) to triumph over another (or several).