5. Cyclops – X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
Killing off beloved comic book characters in movies is always a risky move. In the case of Fox’s X-Men franchise, it’s a narrative device that’s employed somewhat liberally, particularly in X-Men: The Last Stand, which sees numerous iconic characters meet their deaths. One of the worst offenders in the notoriously bad finale of Fox’s initial X-Men trilogy was the death of Cyclops, as it seemed to hit all of the worst notes in character deaths in movies.
Compelled by his grief over losing Jean, Cyclops confronts Phoenix on his own. This ends badly, with Phoenix simply killing the iconic X-Men hero with ease in one of the worst-written character deaths in Hollywood history. Despite his own powers and the general thrust of the story suggesting that Cyclops would have a more robust arc, The Last Stand simply offed him without any pomp or circumstance – he was there one minute, and gone the next.
Cyclops’ death is all the worse for happening off-screen. It’s treated as something of a throwaway moment, simply written in to establish that there’s nothing of Jean left in the Phoenix. It’s a move that wasted one of X-Men‘s most popular characters and failed to even give him a proper ending, making it one of the most senseless and frustrating movie deaths of all time.