Genre Killer

One order of magnitude greater than Franchise Killer, this is when a work somehow manages to take an entire genre down. A rare and unpredictable phenomenon that can, in extreme cases, cause a genre to become Deader Than Disco. This can happen in a variety of ways.
 * A Deconstruction that successfully brings the flaws and illogical elements of a genre to the fore, discrediting the genre.
 * A parody (even accidental) that makes it difficult for anyone to take the genre seriously again.
 * Something so incredibly bad that it leaves a bad taste in audiences' mouths for the entire genre, especially if Sequelitis runs the concept into the ground.
 * A work so good that nothing else can live up to it. This is rare, since these usually just attract imitators, but it can happen if others get sick and tired of being accused of imitating the masterpiece.
 * Other freak events make a genre unviable or unpopular, and a particular work gets perceived as being responsible, true or not.

These often aren't permanent: A good Reconstruction, revival or cleverly marketed reboot can bring a genre Back From the Dead if you pull it off right. Something of a Cyclic Trope, as genres tend to go through periods of death, rebirth and change.

Compare Creator Killer, Star Derailing Role.

Comics - Books

 * Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns caused a period of Darker and Edgier comic books by starting a trend of comic-book Deconstruction and killing off the idealistic Silver Age-type hero (until Kingdom Come made it viable again). Alan Moore, writer of Watchmen, is incredibly aware of this, having spent a majority of his career after the novel trying to undo its influence on comics.
 * The introduction of the Comics Code (which was stricter than the Hays Code) effectively killed the Crime, War and Horror genres in comic books.

Films - Animation

 * The failures of Treasure Planet and Sinbad Legend of the Seven Seas, combined with the success of Toy Story and Shrek, began the rapid decline of 2D animation, culminating in Ice Age. Shortly after that movie debuted with the biggest March opening for a film in history, Disney announced that it would be shutting down the Florida branch of its animation studio, setting off a chain of events that led to Disney abandoning hand-drawn animation altogether just two years later. Luckily, the genre seems to still have signs of life - in 2009 Disney made a commitment to producing a traditionally-animated film every two years, and with Princess and The Frog and Winnie the Pooh performing just about as well as expected at the box office (albeit not much better than that, considering what film the latter was up against), there may yet be hope for a full resurgence.
 * The epic failure of Mars Needs Moms resulted in the shut-down of Robert Zemeckis's studio and with it, the death of motion-capture animation for at least a while.

Films - Live-Action

 * The critical and box office bomb that was One Missed Call ended the trend of J-horror remakes in the late 00's.
 * Batman and Robin, along with Steel are accused of killing superhero movies in The Nineties. Along with everything else in Comic Books, they didn't stay dead for long.
 * In a lesser-known, slightly older example, Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja may well have been the films that killed Sword and Sorcery in media for quite some time; their predecessor Conan the Barbarian, however, was a classic example of Sword and Sorcery brought to film.
 * Seltzer and Friedberg have been blamed for currently killing parody movies; even slightly better ones like Superhero Movie (probably not helped by being named in the same " Movie" style used by S&F) have been lumped in with their disasters.
 * It's said that Airplane! killed the Disaster Movie craze of The Seventies by making audiences unable to take them seriously anymore. While the genre was revived by The Nineties with movies like Armageddon, Deep Impact, Dantes Peak and Volcano, which benefited from the development of modern CGI, the airliner-in-peril/stewardess-lands-the-plane trope won't be taken seriously again.
 * Thanks to Catwoman and Elektra, it doesn't look like there will be any leading ladies in comic book movies anytime soon.
 * Cutthroat Island was an attempt to revive the swashbuckling adventure movie. Instead it just sunk it farther down into its grave, along with Carolco Studios and the careers of almost everyone involved. The genre was not exactly a thriving one at release, but this made sure no one would even attempt another shot at it. Until the creation of Pirates of the Caribbean; but even then, no one seems interested in pirate movies that don't belong to that franchise.
 * The Western was a major film genre for decades before audience's appetites began to fade around the late seventies. Heavens Gate in 1980 was such a box office bomb, however, that Hollywood became very unwilling to release big-budget Western films for many years. Even successful Reconstruction films like Silverado couldn't jump-start the genre back to its original prominence. Almost all modern westerns now subvert some aspect of the genre, such as Unforgiven, Brokeback Mountain and, more recently, the remake of True Grit.
 * Director Michael Cimino's notorious flop Heavens Gate was the final nail in the coffin, but the Western was slowly dying throughout the Seventies. Other landmarks on its last ride were the release of Blazing Saddles in 1974, which was the first commercially successful Western parody, and the death of John Wayne in 1979.
 * Heaven's Gate is also usually blamed for the end of the auteur films produced by Hollywood in the 1970s. Other flops, such as Steven Spielberg's Nineteen Forty One, Peter Bogdanovich's They All Laughed, Martin Scorsese's New York New York and Francis Ford Coppola's One From The Heart and The Cotton Club were also used as examples of the danger of giving auteur filmmakers carte blanche when making "personal" or "blockbuster" films.
 * The film Hello Dolly had, for quite some time, the reputation of having killed the big-scale movie musical, as it was a flop for many years -- until re-couping its losses in the home video market.
 * It was more the music than the form: either they had to feature catchy pop (Grease), become Darker and Edgier (Cabaret), or both (Saturday Night Fever). Probably the killing blow was struck by the old-fashioned At Long Last Love, which also held to the long tradition of hideously miscasting actors in musicals.
 * The failure of The Wiz caused studios to give up on movies with mostly black casts for some time, outside of comedies, black cop/white cop pairings, and "urban" dramas. The smash success of Tyler Perry's films have helped Hollywood take more note of the African-American movie dollar.
 * The disastrous failures of Cleopatra and The Fall of the Roman Empire killed the Sword and Sandal epic for over three decades, until Gladiator revived the genre. There have been a number of Roman and Greek-era action films in the following years.
 * The twin failures of 2007's Hostel: Part II and Captivity brought an end to the "torture porn" subgenre of violent horror films. The Saw series endured for a few more years as a Franchise Zombie, but the only other subsequent standalone theatrical release in the genre, 2009's The Collector, played to empty theaters, and Hostel: Part III is going straight to DVD. The Human Centipede, which was marketed as an inevitable Cult Classic, was only played at midnight in most places, and A Serbian Film had only a single theatrical showing.
 * The Jurassic Park films are an example of one series' smash success making it impossible for subsequent films to live up to it. No one has bothered to make a serious dinosaur movie since, and all films and video games that have happened to feature dinosaurs that have followed, without exception, contain conscious nods to the franchise. Even the American Godzilla film riffed on it in trailers, and featured suspiciously velociraptor-like chase scenes with baby Godzillas.
 * The first Scream was an attempt to do this deliberately. Wes Craven felt that the slasher genre had grown tired and stale by the mid-'90s, and so he made a movie that picked apart and Lampshaded the tropes of the genre, which he felt would make it impossible to take seriously anymore. Did it work? Well, there were three sequels and a host of copycat films, so clearly, it didn't go as planned.
 * Many film historians consider Psycho to the be movie that killed Film Noir, as the purpose of the first hour or so is to continuously set up and subvert the tropes of that genre.
 * Psycho and Bonnie and Clyde killed off many of the tropes associated with the Hays Code, specifically with how violence was represented onscreen.
 * Psycho killed an entire type of filmgoing: it's unthinkable now to just pay for a ticket halfway through a movie and catch the first half in the next showing, but people did it all the time. Until Hitchcock made it a requirement to show up on time to see Psycho.
 * School of Rock, being a send-up of inspirational teacher movies, basically killed that sub-genre and created a new type of sub-genre where the teachers are rather useless (such as Half Nelson and Bad Teacher). Recent attempts at reigniting the sub-genre (such as Freedom Writers and Larry Crowne) have been critical and box office disappointments.
 * Quest for Fire effectively killed the serious caveman movie by setting the bar so high that nobody could hope to compete.
 * Chicago was supposed to revive the Hollywood musical, but actually confirmed its death. The film succeeded by framing its musical numbers as fantasies inside Roxie’s addled mind. This suspended the audience’s disbelief, but also proved that it needed suspension--that basic movie-musical conventions no longer work on their own terms.
 * Oddly, it did revive the "backstage" musical, which we hadn't seen for quite a while.
 * The Three D Movie genre has been killed three times in the past six decades. The first culprit was The Moonlighters, a forgettable Warner Western starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred Mac Murray, in 1953. It didn't help that it had to compete against The Robe, a flat classic in Cinema Scope, during its run. The second culprit was Phantom Of The Rue Morgue, which was just as mediocre, if not moreso, than Moonlighters was; its accomplice was The Mad Magician (a cheap House of Wax clone involving stage magic instead of a wax museum), never mind that that did well at the box office. This time, though, the 3D craze at the time went out not with a whimper, but a bang: the last classic '50s 3D film, Revenge of the Creature, capped off this craze with a successful 3D run, which still wasn't enough to save the craze. A third craze was ended by Spacehunter: Adventure in the Forbidden Zone, a flop with a budget similar to the highly successful Star Wars, with accomplices including The Man Who Wasn't There, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, and Amityville 3D. Since 2009, there have been numerous false alarms about the current 3D craze dying, brought about by the likes of Battle for Terra, Clash of the Titans, The Last Airbender, The Nutcracker in 3D, and, most recently, Conan the Barbarian. Despite all the rumours of the dying craze, though, it's still going on, with high hopes for The Lion King and Beauty and The Beast, among other decent films, to bring 3D back from the brink again.
 * Studios have more of a vested interest in keeping 3D around this time - 3D movies are much harder to pirate, a feature that the industry appreciates very much.
 * If it didn't kill it, Die Hard certainly did serious damage to a certain type of action film. Before Die Hard, action films mainly consisted of enormously ripped military types who carried massive weapons and were always undoubtedly going to succeed. John McClane had a lot more appeal, as he was really just an average guy in a situation he couldn't control, and the film had a lot more knowing humor. The new resonance inspired a whole fleet of imitators (in the nineties, every action film was some form of Die Hard) and all but ended the reign of stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.

Literature

 * Don Quixote's Deconstruction of the Chivalric Romance, in which the main character (and the archetype he represented) is portrayed as insane and idiotic, is widely credited with helping to kill the genre. The genre was already in its death throes about a decade before Cervantes' novel, but it certainly dealt the final blow. Two hundred years later, Lord Byron complained in Don Juan that "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away; / A single laugh demolished the right arm / Of his own country; — seldom since that day / Has Spain had heroes."
 * Madame Bovary by G. Flaubert deconstructed romantic fiction archetypes, helping to end the era of romanticism in fiction and making way for realism.
 * World War I largely killed the "invasion story" genre, which typically detailed foreign invasions of the British Isles by some flavor of Germans or French (depending on who Britain had higher tensions with at the moment). The War of the Worlds, while a more fantastical spin than the norm, is the most well-known example. The genre still persisted post-WWI, with communists or aliens replacing the Germans as the go-to foe of choice, but it never regained anywhere near its former popularity.
 * It really only killed the overt flavour of invasions - covert invasions were a staple of pulp literature right up to World War II, and basically mutated into spy fiction during the Cold War.
 * Twilight is considered by many to be a disgrace to vampires and the vampire genre, as the vampires in the franchise do not drink human blood, sparkle in the sunlight, and are described as being inhumanly beautiful. Oh, and uh…most of them are friendly. However, the immense success of the franchise means that there are several rip-offs in which the vampires are treated just as poorly, but the traditional bloodsucker of the night will never be the same again.

Live-Action TV

 * The Quiz Show was discredited for nearly twenty years in the US after a series of scandals in The Fifties, in which it was learned that a number of popular quiz shows (most notably Twenty One) were being rigged in order to increase tension for viewers, and to give the victory to the contestant the producers wanted to win. Only in The Seventies, with shows like Family Feud, The $10,000 Pyramid, and the Art Flemming version of Jeopardy, would American viewers trust game shows again. Even after the genre came back into vogue, the effects of the scandals left a permanent mark; these new game shows had winnings caps and much smaller amounts of money to be won (big money game shows would not return until Who Wants to Be A Millionaire in The Nineties), and the focus of questions (with the exception of Jeopardy!) shifted from knowledge to word games and puzzles.
 * The Variety Show's demise has been linked to the abject failure of NBC's Pink Lady and Jeff in 1980. There were a few more shows in the genre afterwards, but none was the kind of blockbuster that could make programmers forget how bad this one was.
 * According to Rowdy C of TV Trash, Unhappily Ever After killed off the dysfunctional family sitcom that Married With Children popularized at the start of the 1990s. Some dysfunctional family shows, like Titus (which was based on Christopher Titus's Real Life Dysfunctional Family), The Bernie Mac Show, The War At Home, The King of Queens, Malcolm in The Middle and Grounded for Life have cropped up in the early 2000s and gained positive to mixed reviews, but it wasn't enough to revive the genre. Today, Modern Family and The Middle (no Malcolm), both on ABC, come the closest: Modern Family is uber-popular but focuses on upper-end middle class family dysfunctionality (and spreading it across multiple households) while The Middle is a more straight-up genre example, but like its predecessors hasn't garnered the attention needed to really revive the genre.

Music
""Oh, and by the way -- I'm not sure if drum and bass is dead or dying (I've been in the studio / on tour too long to tell). However, if your genre was flimsy enough to be knocked over by ONE SINGLE RECORDING ARTIST who happened to -- god forbid -- sell some fucking records for the first time in about 5/6 years, then I'm glad it was us that got to drive the final stake through its stale pig shit heart -- and good riddance. Wake me up when your genre is making something that people outside the scene think is worth listening to again.""
 * Be Here Now, the notorious 1997 flop by Oasis, is generally regarded as having killed Britpop. It was actually a major success initially, earning gushing praise from critics and selling eight million copies. However, once people had the chance to actually listen to it, they found that it was nowhere near as good as their first two albums, let alone the masterpiece that had been hyped up for months and which critics had been gushing about. The result was massive Hype Backlash that took the shine off of the biggest band in Britpop. Only a handful of bands (Oasis themselves, Blur, Pulp, Supergrass, Super Furry Animals and, strangely enough, Ocean Colour Scene) wound up surviving the collapse of Britpop for more than a couple years.
 * A major factor in Britpop's demise? Probably. However, on top of the above, Blur -- the other band most associated with the scene (and Oasis' arch-rivals in 1995's "Battle of Britpop") -- had already broken away from it a few months prior with their eponymous "Blur" album (primarily lo-fi and US alt-rock-influenced). Another arguable factor may be that by 1997 "Cool Britannia" had jumped on Britpop's bandwagon, with (e.g.) Geri Halliwell in a Union Jack dress and honeymoon-era Tony Blair schmoozing Britpop stars. This got old fast, and probably helped kill off the remainder of Britpop when it derailed.
 * The rise of Grunge did this to the excesses of Hair Metal in the early '90s. Since hair metal was the dominant genre of metal music within the mainstream rock scene, metal as a whole faded from the limelight for much of The Nineties as a result. Some genres, however, managed to avoid this:
 * Classic Heavy Metal, mainly because of the heavy influence it had on the development of grunge. Black Sabbath, for example, are cited as influences by Soundgarden, Green River, Mudhoney, The Smashing Pumpkins (Billy Corgan praised Dimebag as his favorite contemporary guitarist), Tad, and many others.
 * Alternative Metal, which emerged as a backlash against hair metal. Think Alice in Chains (which is often lumped in with grunge).
 * Sludge metal -- again, thanks to some bands taking heavy influence from grunge (especially the Melvins, an instrumental band in the development of both genres).
 * Death Metal and Black Metal both took off and hit their peaks in The Nineties.
 * Basically, as long as you paid due reverence to '80s Punk Rock and Alternative Rock bands like The Smiths and REM, or you played something extremely abrasive and unquestionably anti-mainstream (see below for more), it was okay to play metal in The Nineties.
 * Any metal music that is considered too mainstream (such as Metalcore and, before that, Nu-metal) tends to get called a genre killer by some metal fans. How much of this has to do with lingering memories of what hair metal did to the genre, and how much of it has to do with elitism and snobbery towards anything "mainstream", is hotly debated. And of course, there are those who view "mainstream" metal as Gateway Music to the more "authentic" genres.
 * Nu Metal faded from popularity in around 2003, though it's not clear what killed it. Evanescence's Bring Me To Life is considered to be the last 'hit' in the genre.
 * Progressive Rock has had several points that are regarded as killing the genre.
 * The second album of Supergroup Asia, featuring members of Yes, King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and several other prog legends, was regarded as a failure musically, and severely damaged prog's reputation. Said reputation was already in sustained free-fall by the time of Asia's 1982 debut (Robert Fripp himself intimated as much back in 1975). Most (surviving) 70's prog bands were already greatly simplifying their sounds by 1980, in response to Punk Rock and New Wave; Asia, by their utter failure to craft anything remotely reminiscent/worthy of prog's 70's heyday, merely confirmed prog's demise for those who hadn't gotten the hint yet.
 * One of the last albums from Emerson Lake and Palmer, Love Beach, is one of the most despised albums in music history, which the band was forced to make to meet out their record deal. The album largely abandoned the prog sound in favor of disco and dance music.
 * In parallel with Britpop, the British music press went hot for "intelligent drum'n'bass", the authentic new sound of black inner city Britain. Goldie's Timeless (1995), although a fine album, opened the door for floods of by-the-numbers d'n'b clones, and the genre quickly became a cliché of television background music and film soundtracks. His 1998 follow-up Saturnz Return was slammed by a jaded press as a self-indulgent, pretentious folly. The opening track, "Mother", was over sixty minutes long. Both Goldie and intelligent drum'n'bass subsequently left the charts, never to return.
 * Some people feel that Glam Rap and pop-rap are currently doing this to Hip Hop, just as Hair Metal did to metal music in the late '80s. But like the metal example, straight forward rap/hip-hop was never particularly popular outside of urban communities. Even Gangsta Rap at its mid-'90s peak only created a handful of rappers with crossover appeal, most of them powered by controversy. In fact, the only time rap in general has ever been hugely successful was when it was infused with pop. The same thing can be said for Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, and Country Music. The problem likely comes from the fact that pop oriented rap music just doesn't dominate top 40 radio, but the more urban specific niche radio as well. Causing a lot of resentment of that particular type of Hip Hop as it's the only genre radio is interested in playing now.
 * Boy Bands were a huge thing back in The Eighties and The Nineties, but the genre was eventually killed off in the early 2000s due to the rising success of white rappers and saturation of the boy band and girl group market, particularly by TV shows like Making The Band that didn't even try to hide their manufactured qualities. It didn't help that plenty of popular bands were already fading out of popularity--by the time the genre was done, most groups had gone on long hiatus (New Kids On the Block, Spice Girls, Nsync) or changed their musical style and faded out of popularity (Backstreet Boys, Hanson). The genre has seen a recent revival in the form of The Jonas Brothers and Big Time Rush, but mostly the industry has preferred to focus on solo Little Boy Blue Note artists.
 * Live Earth, a massive benefit concert co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, was a dismal flop garnering low ratings (especially for the UK and US) and created a massive "carbon footprint," precisely the type of thing the organizers wanted to prevent. The failure of Live Earth is widely believed to have killed off the concept of the benefit super-concert (in the same vein as Farm Aid and Live 8).
 * Depending on where you sit regarding Drum & Bass, Pendulum came close to this, by way of becoming the public face of the genre despite never intending to be in it. Rob Swire himself isn't sure if this has happened, but appears to revel in it, as can be discerned from this extract from his rant on the Dogsonacid forums:

"Rap Critic: "[The murder of Biggie and Tupac] was a big wake-up call for hip-hop fans, because two artists that everyone knew were dead, victims of the lifestyle that was promoted in their music. Hip-hop had gone as dark as people wanted it to go, and they wanted something else.
 * Drum & Bass really suffered more from the development of Techno more than Pendulum; Pendulum even shifted almost completely to a rock style.
 * The twin failures of Chingy's "Powerballin'" and Nelly's "Brass Knuckles" killed the St. Louis rap movement as the once-popular alternative to the East vs. West battle has been relatively quiet since then. The Southern rap movement (which also features Chicago native Kanye West) has gone on to replace it to appeal and popularity.
 * Broken CYDE simultaneously codified and killed Crunkcore. Their music is just competent enough to have spawned fans and imitators seeing some good in the genre, but hilariously bad enough to make literally everyone automatically hate the genre.
 * The murder of Tupac Shakur in 1996 and The Notorious B.I.G. in 1997, within six months of one another, put an end to the Golden Age of Gangsta Rap. As The Rap Critic and The Nostalgia Chick put it (skip to about 6:21):

Nostalgia Chick: Suddenly, the dangerous lives and poverty that some of these guys grew up in and rapped about... it was just a little too real."

Pro Wrestling

 * ECW never did another barbed wire match after Sabu vs Terry Funk. To quote Paul Heyman, "Because no-one could top that! And in good conscience, we didn't want anyone to try."
 * Depending on who you ask, WWE buying out the competition brought an end to the popularity of Pro-Wrestling. A combination of the emergence of MMA and the stagnation of WWE have both played a role in this.

Theater

 * Bizet's Carmen was the genre killer of opera comique, blurring the traditional line between opera comique and opera until the former no longer existed as a distinct genre.
 * Back in 1991, the Broadway production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Aspects of Love closed after a year's worth of performances and lost its entire investment; The New York Times wondered if the disappointment signaled the death knell for the big-budget, pop-operatic, Spectacle-laden "megamusical" trend he spearheaded in The Eighties. In retrospect, the Times was right, at least as far as Broadway was concerned; while Miss Saigon proved a huge international success later that year, it was the last megamusical to do so. Since then, new megamusicals are mostly limited to European (and sometimes Asian) runs -- though the production values and budgets of such shows as The Lion King, Wicked, and especially Spider Man Turn Off the Dark occasionally compare to those of the megamusicals.

Video Games
""You know what? Fuck off. Everyone's always bringing up that fucking robot.""
 * The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 is called that for a reason: Caused chiefly by an overabundance of competitors in a fledgeling market and competition from superior micro-computers, it killed the entire medium in the United States for about two years. Perhaps more importantly, it effectively wiped out North American game/console development, to the point where it took over two decades to fully regain the ground that had been lost to Japanese competitors. There wasn't a successful game console from an American company between the Atari 2600 (dying around 1983), and the Microsoft X Box (released late 2001). That's how badly it crashed.
 * When Nintendo debuted the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, they bundled it with a light gun and battery-operated robot peripheral primarily to disguise the fact that it actually was a video game console. It worked.


 * In the UK, meanwhile, it didn't even make as much impact as two years. Brits started using eight bit microcomputers as the main way of playing home videogames in 1982, which would last until the late 80s/early 90s when consoles started taking off (with the Megadrive and SNES)


 * Free Space 2 destroyed the space shooter genre born of Elite and popularized by Wing Commander. It was not the fault of the game itself, which most critics consider the height of the genre and for which fans are still putting out new content both graphical and gameplay. Its initial sales were so bad that the genre was assumed dead and further development was halted. Many consider the real problem to have been Interplay's marketing.
 * A common joke among fans of the game is that the reason it killed the genre was because it was so good that there was no point in making any further games: perfection had been achieved.
 * The unfortunate retail failure of Unreal Tournament III, backed up by many freeware first-person shooters, has led to the end of commercially released fast-paced deathmatch-centric shooters as the Unreal and Quake series, in place of team-based and/or "tactical" shooters like Call of Duty/Modern Warfare, the Battlefield series, and Left 4 Dead. Team Fortress 2 is one of the few "Quake-like" games released in recent years, and it came in 2007. Due to the continued updates, Team Fortress 2 could be seen as still being released. It could also be said for true tactical shooters in the vein of the older Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six games, the ones with planning and stealth as major elements and the slightest muckup lead to the death of your squad due to the line being blurred.
 * The insane amount of Capcom Sequel Stagnation for the Guitar Hero franchise seems to have done this to the Rhythm Game genre in North America and Europe. Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock and Rock Band 3, released in late 2010, have sold less than 1.5 million units combined, and the competition (Power Gig Rise of the Six String, et al.) outright bombed. While these are respectable figures given that both games come with expensive peripherals, compare this to Guitar Hero 3 (15 million units sold) and the original Rock Band (6 million), both released in 2007, and you can start to see how oversaturation of the market has destroyed the genre's profitability. Following the commercial disappointments of the latest installments, MTV has sold Rock Band developer Harmonix for fifty dollars and Activision has pulled the plug on future Guitar Hero games, and other developers, having bled money from their endeavors, have gotten out of the market.
 * The Four X Real Time Strategy subgenre was killed off when Empire Earth screwed up with its third installation and Age of Empires went bust with Ensemble closed down. Note that Ensemble going bust was Executive Meddling by Microsoft who shut them down after they cranked out nothing but successful games. Recently resurrected with the long-awaited release of Starcraft 2, however it only brought life to the online Multi-Player segment while the drawn-out single player campaigns are still not taken as seriously.
 * The Tycoon genre died when Roller Coaster Tycoon title owner Frontier Developments was sued by Chris Sawyer. Coupled off with many famous companies which made such games going bust ended the Tycoon Genre.
 * The execrable World War II FPS Hour of Victory seems to have killed off WWII shooters, with the only recently successful one being World At War. However, it should be noted that the market had been saturated with them for some time by then and the major franchises shifted to a modern setting.
 * The Point and Click genre in its inventory management form was practically killed off by the success of Myst, and was only recently revived via digital distribution as well as the serial format.

Western Animation

 * According to Stan Sakai, the reason the animated series of Space Usagi was never greenlit was because of the flop of Bucky O Hare and The Toad Wars, with which it shared a rabbit protagonist and sci-fi setting. Networks were apparently reluctant to touch any animals-in-space properties for years afterwards. The saddest part? Word of God of Bucky's publisher says that despite the show's success, Bucky -- and thus the genre -- died simply because of a toy shipment screw-up leaving stores with more shelfwarmers than "wanted" figures; Bucky was Merchandise Driven, therefore it was cancelled.
 * The 1946 Looney Tunes short Book Revue with Daffy Duck so thoroughly spoofed the "Things come to life in a store and have fun until they have to stop some book monster" plot that it effectively prevented anyone from picking up the plot again, unless as a direct homage.