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Dead Star Walking (view source)

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So, you're cast in a brand new series, and there's something about your character that just screams, "Hey, major character here." It could be that you're a name performer, or the character plays a central role, or is just plain interesting. So why do you get guest star billing? Well, either your [[Fake Guest Star|contract requires it]], or the powers that be are out to [[Killed Off for Real|kill you]], if not in the premiere, then by the 2nd episode. Or it could just be that they don't have enough to pay your name performer salary for more than a few appearances.
 
Basically, a subversion of [[Contractual Immortality]]. This trope is occasionally used to effect (or ''[[Mauve Shirt|affect]]'') [[Anyone Can Die]]. In pilot episodes, it's also an early indicator of [[Sacrificial Lamb]]. It tends to be less surprising in television because it's generally assumed that [[Mel Gibson (Creator)|Mel Gibson]] isn't going to be sticking around your family sitcom forever.
 
See also [[Billing Displacement]], [[Death Byby Cameo]] and at times [[Decoy Protagonist]].
 
{{deathtrope}}
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{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* Prof. Heinz Schneider in ''[[El Cazador Dede Lala Bruja]]''. And he is voiced by [[Names to Know In Anime|Shinichiro Miki]], to boot.
* Kisaragi is one of the first named characters to appear in ''[[Elfen Lied]]'' and gets a proper introduction. Name bar? Check. [[Dojikko|Clumsy but cute?]] Check. Works for another main character? Yeppers. Determined to overcome her shyness and make people proud of her one day? Double check. Twenty pages/five minutes later she has her head ripped off, the pens from her pocket repurposed as deadly projectiles, and her corpse used as a [[Bulletproof Human Shield|meat shield]] that gets shredded to pieces in a hail of bullets, only to be dumped in a corridor once everyone else is dead. [[Anyone Can Die|This immediately sets the tone]] for the next 106 chapters.
* Happens in ''[[Gantz]]'' a lot.
* In ''[[Ga -Rei Zero]]'' the squad in the promotional posters and trailers, supposed to be the main characters of the series, after kicking some ass are surprisingly slaughtered at the end of first episode. The true main characters first appear in episode 2.
* Extreme example: ''[[Genesis Climber Mospeada]]'' leaves just one survivor in episode 1, bumping off everyone else.
* Two examples from the same series: In ''[[Gundam Seed]]'' and ''[[Gundam Seed Destiny]]'', singer TM Revolution voices two short-lived characters. In SEED, Miguel is a Face Enemy who actually survives his first battle with the protagonist. However, he is promptly killed in the very next battle. This was telegraphed by the fact that he wasn't in the OP, though. However, in the sequel, its more played like a running gag, despite the depth of the character.
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* ''[[Soukou no Strain]]'' kills the lead character's two love interests, best friends, enemy, most of the cast of the first episode... in the best example of [[Dead Star Walking]], the series actually kills off Tanaka Rie's character''twice''.
* Yet another anime example is Seki Ray Shiroe from ''[[Toward the Terra]]'', played by [[Marina Inoue]]; it seems as though he might even become the protagonist's protege, and failing that, he begins to cultivate a relationship with the antihero as well - however, he is heartlessly (and, in the manga and original movie, a bit abruptly) snuffed out. (Savvy fans may predict this trope when they observe that [[Cross-Dressing Voices|Inoue]] is the only voice actor credited for Shiroe, indicating that he's not going to live long enough for his voice to change.)
* In ''[[Baccano (Light Novel)|Baccano]]!'', [[Masakazu Morita]]'s character gets his face blown off [[Gory Discretion Shot|during the closing]] of [[Sacrificial Lamb|the very episode he first shows up in]]. Or did he?
** For those of you who do not pay close attention to Japanese seiyuu, the character is Claire Stanfield.
* Oh, look, an obvious love interest! Aw, look how that [[Nice Guy|cute Chinese exchange student]] keeps [[Meet Cute|rescuing her]] from all the evil people with superpowers chasing her! Wait a minute... did he just knock her out after getting information out of her? And... hold on, we saw that [[Badass Longcoat]] at the beginning of the last episode... Wait, she wasn't even the real person? And did she just jump in front of him so she dies from a [[Beat Still My Heart|rather nasty attack]] instead? Congratulations, you have just finished [[First Episode Spoiler|the second episode]] of ''[[Darker Than Black]]''.
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** But the character still appears in various flashback scenes. So it could be a subversion.
* [[Mamoru Miyano]] voices Rei's boyfriend in ''[[Highschool of the Dead]]'' and gets turned into one of [[Not Using the Z Word|them]] and later killed at the end of the first episode.
* [[Jun Fukuyama]] voices Suguru Aizawa in ''[[Area no Kishi (Manga)|Area no Kishi]]''. The soccer star is pronounced dead by the third episode. [[Posthumous Character|He still continues to play a significant role in the plot, though.]]
 
 
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* In the [[Marvel Comics]] series ''Exiles'', Magnus was one of the six characters gathered in the first issue as a team of dimension-hoppers who must [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]]. He was also clearly the most powerful of the six. In the second issue he dies, and it eventually became clear this was an inherent gimmick of the series to allow logical cast changes.
* In the first issue of Peter Milligan and Mike Allred's run on the Marvel comic book ''X-Force'', a new X-Force team is introduced with most of the focus put on the sympathetic team leader. Almost all of the team gets brutally killed off in the same issue, including aforementioned leader. This effects [[Anyone Can Die]] for the remainder of the book's run and its follow-up ''X-Statix''.
* The second team of [[X -Men]] included mainstays like Storm, [[Wolverine]], Nightcrawler and Colossus. It also included Thunderbird, who died on the team's second mission.
 
 
== Films -- Live-Action ==
* Even though [[Robert De Niro]] is billed as the main character in the 2001 police drama ''15 Minutes'', he is kidnapped and brutally killed less than halfway through the film, forcing another detective (played by Edward Burns) to avenge his death.
* Ewan McGregor receives top billing in ''[[Alex Rider (Literature)|Alex Rider]]: Stormbreaker''. His sole appearance in the film is in the first few minutes, where he is quickly killed off, and not even given a chance to interact with any of the other characters.
* Traci Lords was given poster billing in ''[[Blade]]''. She dies in the first battle scene, less than ten minutes in.
* In the Canadian horror flick ''[[Cube]]'', a character named Alderson (played by Julian Richings) is billed to be the major character of the film, had his visage pinned to all the promotional posters, and is killed brutally in the first five minutes of the movie by a wire trap before the focus shifts to the ''real'' group of protagonists.
* In ''[[Deep Blue Sea]]'', [[Samuel L. Jackson]] is killed by a rampaging shark that leaps out of a submarine bay to get him. His death is arguably [[Sacrificial Lion|the biggest shock in the entire film]], possibly because it's so sudden.
* [[Sean Bean]] in ''[[Equilibrium]]''.
* [[Steven Seagal]] in ''[[Executive Decision]]''.
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** Estevez isn't even ''credited''.
* Janet Leigh in ''[[Psycho]]'' (although she didn't go as quickly as Barrymore). This is one of the oldest examples.
* In ''[[Scream (Filmfilm)|Scream]]'', [[Drew Barrymore]] is killed off ten minutes into the movie. [[Throw It In|She came up with the idea]], having been initially cast as [[Final Girl|Sidney]].
** Pffft, that's nothing. The '''''[[Sarah Michelle Gellar|Slayer]]''''' bites it in the second film.
** The fourth film kills off five characters -- including [[Lucy Hale]] and [[Anna Paquin]] -- before the title card.
* In the 2005 action film ''Stealth'', Jamie Foxx's character, Henry, is killed off suddenly while trying to pilot his aircraft through a canyon, less than halfway through the film. Although Stealth was made before ''Ray'' (which was one of Foxx's breakout roles), the film was released afterwards, and shocked audiences who expected Foxx's character to survive.
* Perhaps the most impressive occurrence is in the first ''[[Superman (Comic Book)|Superman]]'' movie; [[Marlon Brando]] received top billing, and what was at the time the highest salary ever paid to a motion picture actor, to play a character with 8 minutes of screen time who dies before the end of the first act. Furthermore, Christopher Reeve was relegated to ''third'' billing even though he plays the lead character of the film. Fortunately, people caught on quickly to how much he was responsible for making the film so good.
** The press coverage (as opposed to the studio publicity) at the time of the initial release talked extensively about Brando's big paycheck for so little screen time so the audience wasn't completely unprepared. This may have also tipped off late-70s movie-goers not to expect too much from his appearance in ''[[Apocalypse Now]]'' a few years later.
* In ''U-571'', a number of American submariners, including Bill Paxton (who's set up to be one of the main characters), are killed a quarter of the way through the film during a disastrous escape from a German U-boat.
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* Ken Watanabe was cast (with much publicity) as Ra's Al Ghul in ''[[Batman Begins]]''. Turns out he's an imposter who dies very early in the movie - an intentional deception to set up the twist to the mystery of exactly who the [[Big Bad]] was toward the end.
* [[Morgan Freeman]] gets killed halfway through ''The Sum of All Fears''.
** And ''twice'' in ''[[Red (Film)|Red]]''. At the beginning, we think he has been killed, then he pops up again and shortly after performs a [[Heroic Sacrifice]] at around the halfway mark of the film.
* Arguably [[Val Kilmer]] and Christian Slater in ''[[Mind Hunters]]''.
* ''[[Alien]]''. Tom Skerritt is top-billed during a period in his career where audiences would naturally assume he was the main character. The Xenomorph (and the scriptwriters) disagreed.
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* Sophia Loren got top billing for ''Operation Crossbow''. She appeared for about 15 minutes and then was murdered by [[La Résistance|the Resistance]] because she could compromise the mission.
* Franco Nero in ''Sacra Corona'' gets killed off in the first two minutes, after maybe two lines. Then he gets a second appearance as a ghost, with barely a few lines. He also happens to be one of the four characters on the cover, next to [[The Hero]], [[The Lancer]] and the [[Big Bad]], despite there being countless other characters who had a much greater impact on the plot.
* [[Bruce Campbell]] in ''[[From Dusk Tilltill Dawn]]: Texas Blood Money''. He received top billing, but not only does he die very quickly, his "death" is part of an in-film movie that a character is watching.
** Likewise, in ''[[Congo]]'', Campbell plays a researcher who is brutally killed by an ape in the first few minutes of the film. The main group of characters later stumble upon his body.
* In ''[[Children of Men]]'', Julianne Moore is the second-billed actress after the star Clive Owen (possibly misleading some viewers into thinking she is the last pregant woman who Theo has to escort to safety). She gets introduced early on, and being Theo's ex-wife, starts setting up a sub-plot about the two of them reconnecting their lost love. Then they try to drive a young girl out of the country and Julian gets shot through the throat. All this happens in the first 20 minutes, and the rest of the film is centered around Theo helping said young girl after discovering she is pregnant.
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* Angie Dickinson in [[Brian De Palma]]'s ''Dressed To Kill''. She's top-billed in the credits alongside [[Michael Caine]], but gets brutally murdered less than halfway into the movie. It's appropriate, since ''Dressed To Kill'' is an overt homage to Hitchcock.
* Aaron Eckhart plays the redneck boyfriend of the title character in the 2001 comedy ''Nurse Betty''...for all of 20 minutes, until he gets half his scalp ripped off and is shot as he pitifully tries to run away from the contract killers played by [[Chris Rock]] and [[Morgan Freeman]].
* Zig-zagged in ''[[Red (Film)|Red]]''. [[Morgan Freeman]]'s character is killed off very early on...: Then it turns out he's still alive. But he dies again about halfway through the film, this time for real.
* Robert Patrick in ''Safe House''.
* [[Olivia Wilde]] in ''[[In Time]]''.
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== Live-Action TV ==
* [[The BBC]] has done this so often in its genre series in the 2000s that it's become predictable.
** The first example, genuinely surprising and gruesome: Lisa Faulkner on ''[[Spooks]]'' was being set up as a major performer on the show, playing a Spooks employee moving from a desk job to field work. She got deep fried in the 2nd episode. Literally. Her head was shoved into a deep fryer. It worked for surprise on this show because of the lack of any kind of credits. It also established early on that any character could be killed at any time which made the program much more suspenseful. The spin-off ''[[Spooks: Code 9]]'' also killed off the apparent team leader at the end of the first episode.
** [[Freema Agyeman]] was heavily involved in the promotion of the remake of ''[[Survivors (TV series)|Survivors]]''. She dies halfway through the first episode. To add to the impact, the character she played was, in the original, the only one to survive for the entire show.
*** The 1970s original did this as well, casting the well-known Peter Bowles as husband to Abby (played by relative unknown Carolyn Seymour) who stays healthy while she collapses with the plague. However, towards the end of the first episode, ''she'' is the one who wakes up, to find his dead body, after he succumbs off-screen. With no actors listed in the opening titles and some very careful scripting, it was probably a big shock to viewers at the time. This was repeated in the remake, with Abby's husband played by Shaun Dingwall, Rose's dad Pete from ''[[Doctor Who]]''. Paul's death near the start of the second season is also a good one - half the Season 1 cast had just been written out after a big format change and the show seemed settled on a new direction, only to promptly kill off another first series star within a couple of episodes.
** In ''[[Torchwood (TV)|Torchwood]]'' Suzie Costello, played by Indira Varma, is the second-in-command of Torchwood Three...for most of episode one. Then she explains how she can't live without the job but is going to get fired when they find out she's been killing people for Resurrection Gauntlet test subjects and [[Driven to Suicide|puts a bullet in her skull]]. She comes back, though, and is revealed to have had a goddamn amazing [[Xanatos Gambit]] going ''which planned for her death and resurrection as a crucial stage'', in the episode "They Keep Killing Suzie". She was also featured heavily in the promotional material. ''Torchwood'' is an odd example in that its leading man and star gets killed several times a season. He [[Resurrective Immortality|doesn't stay dead]] for long, though.
*** In ''[[Torchwood Miracle Day (TV)|Torchwood: Miracle Day]]'', we get Dr. Juarez, who is killed off (as much as someone can die in ''Miracle Day'', anyway) the very episode where she joins the Torchwood team.
** [[Jamie Bamber]]'s character Mitchell Hoban in ''[[Outcasts]]''. All of the promotional material assures the viewer that Mitchell, why he's acting so irrationally, his Expeditionary Forces, and his conflict with President Tate are going to be vital parts of the show. Then, in the pilot, he commits [[Suicide Byby Cop]] via Fleur after beating his wife into a coma.
** [[Jamie Bamber]], period. Hoban is just one of ''many'' of his characters to be killed off, to the point where two of them ([[Horatio Hornblower|Archie Kennedy]] and [[Law and Order UK|Matt Devlin]]), died in an eerily similar fashion ([[Blood From the Mouth]], [[Heroic Sacrifice]]), and two others (on ''[[Cold Case (TV)|Cold Case]]'' and [[Ghost Whisperer]]) bit the dust even faster than Hoban did, being killed off [[Posthumous Character|within the first few minutes of the show]].
* Tom Skeritt was the father in ''Brothers and Sisters''. Although the father died in the pilot, he has appeared in flashbacks since.
* ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'': [[Joss Whedon]] wanted to do this for Eric Balfour as Jesse in the first episode, but was denied permission by the network. He ultimately got his wish in Season 6, when after thirty-nine appearances as a guest star Amber Benson was finally promoted to the show's full credits - just in time for her character Tara to be shot dead.
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* Parodied on ''[[Police Squad!]]'': in each episode's [[Title Montage]], a different celebrity [[Special Guest]] is killed off ''as they are being introduced''.
* Detective Terry Crowley in ''[[The Shield]]'' seems to be set up as one of the main characters of the series in the pilot episode when he's assigned to the Strike Team as a mole with the intention of exposing their corrupt activities, and gets more than his fair share of screen time in the process... until the final minute of the episode, where Vic Mackey and Shane Vendrell kill him and frame an also-deceased drug dealer as the killer. Crowley's death isn't brushed aside, though, as it haunts the Strike Team for the rest of the series and the character himself appears in flashback episodes.
* An unusual variation: in the fourth season of ''[[Star Trek: Voyager (TV)|Star Trek Voyager]]'' (Trek itself having numerous examples played straight), Jennifer Lien, cast regular for the first three seasons, is billed as a "special guest star." Her character [[Ascend to Aa Higher Plane of Existence|violently evolved into an energy being and abruptly left the show]] in the second episode of that season, once her [[Suspiciously Similar Substitute]] was settled.
* Like ''[[Spooks]]'', FX Network's ''[[Series/Thief|Thief]]'' had a 6-episode first season. Like ''[[Spooks]]'', it bumped off a name performer by the 2nd episode: Linda "Terminator 1 and 2" Hamilton as the handler. Unlike ''[[Spooks]]'', Hamilton was just the latest in a rather misogynistic streak. Including the handler, there were three surprising deaths in the first two eps -- all women. Unlike ''[[Spooks]]'', ''Thief'' was not renewed beyond its initial 6 ep run.
* In ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'', [[Terminator|Robert Patrick]] plays Colonel Sumner in the pilot. He's supposed to be the head of the military unit attached to the Atlantis team, and naturally is killed off before the end of the second episode.
** Fans expected the same trick to be pulled in the premiere of ''[[Stargate Universe (TV)|Stargate Universe]]'' with Lou Diamond Phillips, who didn't seem to have an appropriately large role for a name-actor. However, his character lived, and the one who actually died in the pilot was [[Hey, It's That Guy!|that guy who played]] [[Jerk Jock|Shooter McGavin]] in ''[[Happy Gilmore]]''.
* The ''Doctor Who'' TV Movie actually brought back Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor, just so he could be killed off to regenerate into Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor.
* William Hurt gets top billing as Duke Leto Atreides in [[Sci Fi]] Channel's ''[[Dune]]'' miniseries, despite his character getting killed at the end of part one (of three). Similar thing for Susan Sarandon in the sequel, but they did elevate her character more from the books.
* About 20 or so characters introduced in volume three of ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]''.
* In ''[[Angel (TV)|Angel]]'', Doyle was killed off after 9 episodes, and if it weren't for his visions Angel wouldn't have such an easy time finding (and killing) the baddies.
* Ingo Fischer, one of the two top-billed stars in ''[[Alarm FurFuer Cobra 11]],'' died in the second episode.
* For the first few seasons of ''[[Lost in Space]]'', Doctor Smith (Jonathan Harris) got billed as a special guest star in the title credits. [[Word of God]] has it that he was supposed to escape the ship (or die) early on, but that never came about.
* HBO gleefully marketed Sean Bean as the [[Decoy Protagonist|"main character"]] for the [[Game of Thrones]] adaptation. Then his head gets chopped off. Another example is Jason Momoa of [[Stargate Atlantis]] fame, who doesn't merit the opening credits despite being a major character. He gets killed off partway through.
** Although, to be fair, Sean Bean does make it almost to the end of the first season before dying (episode 9 out of 10). Jason Mamoa's character, doesn't die until the last episode. Other cast members who are stars make it through the season.
* [[Callum Keith Rennie]] as Don Morgan in ''[[Alphas]]'': the team's original government liaison, who is present in the pilot episode, [[Put Onon a Bus]] for the second, and then violently killed off in the third.
* Though he wasn't a big star at the time, it's amusing to see Jimmy Smits playing Don Johnson's partner only to get blown up within the first few minutes of the pilot episode of ''[[Miami Vice]].''
 
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== Western Animation ==
* Ooh, popular character Cliffjumper is featured in his own [[Transformers Prime]] commercial! And he's played by [[Dwayne Johnson]] as well! And he's been upgraded from a Bumblebee clone into an awesome horned muscle car! He's killed before we are introduced to the remaining heroes. [[It Got Worse|And brought back as a zombie berzerker in the second episode.]] [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill|And sliced in half by Megatron, dropped into a mine shaft, and buried by a mountain-shattering explosion.]]
* The 90s animated ''[[X -Men]]'' series mirrored Thunderbird's death on the modern team's second mission by including Morph, a character apparently introduced in the first episode just to be killed off immediately (he actually turns out to have survived in a later episode, whether that was intended in his "death" episode is debatable). The character was based on Changeling, the first X-Man to die in the comics.
 
{{reflist}}
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