12 Movie Characters Who Died And Then Came Back to Life

Major character death is a trope as old as storytelling itself, meant to add stakes and realism to the most fantastical of narratives, or to simply inject some shock value to keep things from feeling stale. When someone you know and have grown to love is killed off, things feel a little more serious, a little more real, and their death hits harder than, say, some nameless guy who had the misfortune to wear a red shirt.

There have been times when the death of a beloved character is just too sad, or has to be reversed to suit some future plot point. In those cases, the characters, no matter how they died (or “died”) are miraculously brought back to life, whether by some new technology, new magic, or just plain retconning. Sometimes these returns are done well and seem to fit in with the themes of the series; sometimes they’re very silly and they make everyone mad.

In modern cinema’s biggest franchises, dead characters making grand returns is something you might as well go ahead and expect until proven otherwise. Certain movie series have become almost notorious for constantly bringing back people who we assumed had died, or people who really did die, and have been brought back to life via other means. Here, we’ve collected ten of the wildest ways movies have come up with to bring back iconic characters killed off in previous films. Whether you like it or not, somehow, they all returned.

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