Hollywood's ever-dispensable people of color

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackDudeDiesFirst

In Heat the first member of the criminal gang to get killed during the bank robbery shotout is the getaway driver Donald Breedan, played by Dennis Haybert. Doesn't seem fair, since he'd only been a gang member for mere hours. Subverted as Sergeant Drucker (Mykelti Williamson), one of Hanna's detectives, is still standing after the shootout, and the first police casualty is Detective Bosko (Ted Levine).
• In Red, Morgan Freeman dies first, then turns up alive, then is the first to die for real.
• In Aliens Frost is the first major character to go, and Apone isn't far behind him.
•The Monster Squad - the only character with any lines to die in the movie is the black cop who serves as partner to Sean's dad. His consolation prize, at least, is that he'll have one damn good story for St. Peter: Dracula blows him up with a stick of dynamite.
• Corporal Eightball in Full Metal Jacket, sent to do recon, first to be abated.
• In Gremlins, the black science teacher dies first.
•Enter the Dragon plays it straight. Of the three main protagonists, Williams exists only to show off his fabulous afro and be killed by the villain first. However, this did not happen by design. In the original script, Roper died in Williams's place. Executive Meddling switched their roles around.
• In Stargate, the black soldier is not even present during the first alien attack, but is still the first one to die. As it happens, the team had split into two groups, and the group without the black soldier came under attack; however, that group was incapacitated by solely non-lethal means, simply knocked out with hard blows to the head. When the other group (With the black guy) returns, the first thing the aliens do is shoot the black guy, and then proceed to start firing wildly at the rest of the soldiers.
• In United 93, between the two pilots of the aforementioned plane, one is white while the other is black. Give ya three guesses who's the first to get shanked by the hijackers.
• Paul Winfield has had this happen to him in his SF films, including twice in the Star Trek universe (as Capt. Terrell in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and as Dathon in Star Trek: The Next Generation). In Damnation Alley, he wasn't the very first to die, but he still gets eaten by killer cockroaches. He's also the first person to die in Mars Attacks!
• In the 90s slasher film Dr. Giggles this is almost exaggerated as the first two teens to die are both black. The film also has a black cop who has a much more prominent role. He still dies at the end though.
• In Virus, the black crew member appears to die halfway through the movie, but in a surprise twist, comes back at the end armed with a rocket launcher to save the hero and the heroine from the monster. Only to die in the process.
• In The Edge, Harold Perrineau is eaten by the bear first.
• Happens twice in the film version of The Crow. The first of T-Bird's crew who Eric encounters and kills is Tin-Tin, the black knife-wielding guy. Then, near the end of the film when Eric is trying to rescue Sarah, Grange is the first to die when Albrecht guns him down.
•Queen of the Damned begins with Lestat waking up from his sleep and drinking a black man dry.
• The first person to die in Alien Nation is Sykes' original partner, who is shot and killed by a shotgun-wielding crook while he's wearing a Bullet Proof Vest and crouched behind a car. It turns out the shotgun slugs were armor-piercing.
•3000 Miles to Graceland has five Elvis impersonators setting out to rob a casino. The black one dies first.
• Among Sinbad's crew in Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger is the party-loving Maroof. He is the first (and only) to get killed by the bad guys. Guess what skin color he has?
• In B-Movie The Killer Shrews, as seen on MST3K, the white protagonist's black friend/employee/servant/Dixieland jazz musician goes outside to take care of the boat during the storm and gets eaten by the shrews first. When the hero finds out, he seems genuinely angry for a moment. Their next victim is a Mexican, who gets much less mourning.
•Red Dawn (1984) is an extreme example. In the storyline, millions of people die offscreen. Dozens of white people die on screen. Only one black guy dies in the whole movie, but he's dead within the first two minutes!
• In Assignment Outer Space, this is why The Captain gets the Heroic Sacrifice. (The Millstone saves the day).
• The Agony Booth recap of Hulk featured the insight "It's not so much that the black guy dies first, it's that the black guy dies first 90 minutes into the movie".
• In the miniseries adaptation of of Stephen King's The Langoliers, the sole black man in the group of survivors dies first. (In the original, he wasn't black, though he wore a Red Shirt.)
• Not a dude, but the first member of the team killed in Hollow Man is the token minority.
•Scream 2. The first two characters to bite it are black, both in horrifying ways. Omar Epps (pre-House), through use of barely audible whispers to draw him close enough to the wall of the toilet to get stabbed in the ear, to Jada Pinkett being stabbed repeatedly in front of hundreds of witnesses who think it's an act and even encourage the killer. ◦ The black cameraman later points out that "Brothers don't last long in situations like this.". He smartly leaves town shortly, and lives.
• In American Psycho, The first victim the films shows Patrick Bateman killing is a homeless black man. Of course, it's debatable whether he really did the killing, or if it was just a figment of his imagination - like the other killings in the film.
• In Deep Blue Sea, the actual first deaths are of white people; however, of the group of survivors trying to reach the surface Russell Franklin (played by Samuel L. Jackson) dies first. The other black character, Preacher, is well aware of this trope.
Preacher: I'm done. Black guys never make it out of situations like this, not ever. He lives. One of only two characters who do.
• No lampshading or reversal in Roger Corman's Deep Star Six: there is only one black guy among the crew, and the accidentally dug-up deep-sea monster bites him in half as the first appetizer.
•Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer: The gruff black general is killed by Doctor Doom.
•Wing Commander: When Paladin and Knight (the black guy) are making a torpedo run on a battleship, Knight blows up even though he took just as many hits as Paladin did.
• In Stealth not only does the black dude die first, he was the one out to avoid the conflict that lead to it.
• The Nature's-revenge flick Kingdom of the Spiders plays it straight as well. The one farm in town owned by a black couple is ground zero for the imminent tarantula invasion. The husband is the first human to die, after the spiders kill his cattle and dog.
• Inverted in Night of the Living Dead. The only black guy in the group survives the night, and then gets shot in the morning, after being mistaken for a zombie.
• In the British/Irish horror movie Wilderness, the only black inmate was the first one to die.
• The first death shown in the Saw rip-off Are You Scared was that of a white girl, but when the actual cast of six teenagers was introduced, the obnoxious black guy was the first one to kick the bucket.
• In the 70s picture, The Great Santini, a black dude does die first, but he manages to kill his killer too.
• The heroic party in the Dungeons & Dragons movie consisted of the heroic white thief, the plucky comic relief black thief, the love interest white mage, and the gruff Scottish dwarf, as well as a black female elf. The black thief dies, though the elf survives the film.
• The Sci Fi Channel movie Sand Serpents has the only two black members of a Marine platoon die first, the first eaten by the serpents, the second killed in a car wreck.
◦ Another SciFi Original, Scream of the Banshee, has the black police officer get killed off first. Otto's actor Todd Haberkorn immediately lampshaded this during the premiere.
◦And another one, Ice Age 2012 (not related to Ice Age or 2012) has a giant glacier somehow plow its way across Canada propelled by a bunch of volcanoes erupting, but a black scientist still manages to die first by accidentally flying his helicopter into one of the eruptions.
• Panic in Ticks is only one of the protagonists to die.
• Happened in Death Wish V The Face Of Death when Tommy O'Shea's goons killed a lesser black worker from the fashion department execution style.
• In Christine, a black assembly-line worker is the first victim of the titular killer car.
• The first victim in New Year's Evil is the main character's female Black Best Friend.
• The only black character in Spider Baby is killed in the film's intro. Interestingly, from the same director who would later bring us Blaxploitation classics Coffy and Foxy Brown.
•The Mutant Chronicles: Both black guys who appear in the film die by bridge within a couple minutes of each other.
•Magma: Earth's Molten Core has the Jerkass mayor die in on coming lava while screaming "NO!" Or was it him getting buried in hot rocks? It's hard to tell.
• In the Halloween remake, Joe Grizzly is Michael's first "proper" victim after he escapes the mental institution. ◦ Earlier Halloween movies managed to avert this. In Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and Halloween: Resurrection the black guys makes it to the end while rescuing the main girl.
• In Super 8, when Colonel Nelec's bus is attacked, he tells one of his soldiers to shoot the attacker with a tracking dart while having the driver open the door. Both are black, and both evidently have seen this movie before, because they both immediately give him a look which just screams "Oh, hell no." Predictably, both die. ◦ Earlier, the movie actually subverted the trope. There was Doctor Woodward, the black man in the Almost Dead Guy state after a train crash. You'd think he would die by the time the Air Forces reached him. But nope, the doctor survived the train crash and the capture, then died after the deaths of a sheriff, a shop clerk and a cableman (all white, in that order).

• In X-Men: First Class, Darwin, the only Black mutant/character, is killed after only a few minutes onscreen, before the major battle, and other than the head villain of the film, he is the only mutant protagonist or antagonist to die. His power to adapt to anything to survive really helped him. ◦ Of course, he may not have been Killed Off for Real, since as Raven says, they "[couldn't] even bury him" and because, well, he's a comic book character. ◾ And more to the point, Darwin's comic book counterpart actually did survive having his body destroyed.
◦ It's worth noting that he is not the first character to die, only the first mutant. We see a friend of the protagonists killed a few minutes before Darwin, and dozens of CIA agents are killed in one shot by the big bad before Darwin's death.
• In the hip-hop drama 8 Mile, one of B Rabbit's opponents, Lotto, raps during their freestyle battle: "I'll spit a racial slur honkey, sue me/This *beep* is a horror flick but the black guy doesn't die in this movie."
• In Aliens Vs Predator Requiem, a group of five high school students (including one black student) is ambushed by an Alien inside the high school. Guess which one the Alien kills first.
• The black character Luther is the first person to die in 1973 film The Sting.
• In Apocalypse Now, the two black guys are the first and second members of the boat crew to die.
• Played straight in the beginning of Jurassic Park.
• A pair of black policemen accidentally fall off a building to their deaths while attempting to pursue a criminal in The Other Guys. ◦ Noteworthy in that it's Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, the last people you would expect to die.
•Dead Air: The security guard at the radio station, while not technically the first on-screen death, is the first of the named characters to die as the Synthetic Plague spreads through the city.
• This happens twice in Mortal Kombat: Liu Kang's first (black opponent) ends up having his soul sucked out by Tsung after Liu refuses to finish him, and Art Lean ends up dead at Goro's hands.
• This never factored into the Final Destination movies until the fifth, in which the very last scene drops a bridge on the sole surviving cast member, a black guy.
•The Bucket List, which is about two men diagnosed with terminal illnesses, has Morgan Freeman's character die first at the end.
• Both Kung Fu Panda movies open with this trope; the rhinoceros characters are consistently played by black voice actors, most prominently Michael Clarke Duncan, and they die (in the first movie, in droves) first.
• In 300, Leonidas kicks the black messenger down a well.
•Real Genius opens with a bunch of military and intelligence bigwigs discussing a space-laser-based assassination system. The one black man at the table gets up, announces that he has moral qualms about the project, and asks to be reassigned. After he leaves the room, one of the other bigwigs says "We may have to liberate him." Another says "Liberate? As in 'liquidate?'"
•State of Play begins with a black thief being shot to death.
•A Christmas Story: When Ralphie gets his BB gun and fantasizes about shooting the villains, the black guy gets shot first.
•Chronicle, which otherwise does a pretty good job of averting or subverting most sci-fi/superhero tropes, plays this straight. The first character to die by Andrew's hands was Steve, the only black character with telekinesis.
• Played straight after the opening scene in Fridaythe13th Part 3. The three bikers are all black, and they get killed off one by one.
•John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars has a triple-header: Braddock, the first of the main cast to die, is black, a woman, and a lesbian. ◦ His other movie The Thing is interesting that beside the main character, the two black characters survive up to the very end, one of them even a Red Shirt. The film doesn't even have one black character die in the whole film, with Childs surviving and Nauls presumed dead, although so was Childs at the time.

• In Attack The Block, the first people to die are a pair of white police officers, but the first named character to die is black, as is every other casualty. All the white characters survive. However, Moses and Biggz both survive and Moses is the one who ultimately saves the day.
• In Slaughter High, black janitor Digby dies first.
• 2006 ghost movie La Llorona a.k.a. The Wailer is another example.
• In the French zombie flick Mutants the only black character in the film is the third to die. The first two to die were men shev killed due to them being infection. The reason for her death was because she shot a guy who the couple didn't think was infected and they protested. She was going to shoot them if they didn't cooperate and they shot first. Ironically the man was infected and his blood contaminated the husband.
•Discussed in Canadian Bacon, by Boomer and Karbal who is worried it will happen to him.
• In Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Mercutio, played by a black guy, dies first. (Mercutio dies first in the play as well.)
• Completely averted in the Matrix Trilogy, in which the ONLY main character from the first film to survive the entire series is Morpheus (thus also dodging the standard "mentor death" tropes).
• Played with in Kill Bill: Vernita Green's death is the first shown, but the second on the Bride's hit list; O-Ren Ishii's name is already crossed out. Part 1 then jumps back to the Bride hunting down and killing O-Ren (and most of her mooks, and a couple creeps back at the hospital).


• Reversed in Mindhunters. The white character (played by Christian Slater) built up as the lead hero during the promotions, ends up dying first in the film. The black character (played by LL Cool J) ends up being one of the last two survivors and a hero. ◦ LL Cool J apparently has it in his contract now that his characters can't be killed off, meaning any appearance by him will be an aversion (as well as a total suspense-killer for anyone who's aware of this).
• In The Island Starkweather Two Delta provides a major hook to the film in his horrific early death, while the very distinctly African Albert Laurent manages to escape the violent deaths that claim most of his team-mates and make a rather significant Heel Face Turn at the end. ◦ As Michael Bay mentions on the commentary track to the DVD, he actually asked the actor Djimon Hounsou something like "How would you like to be the black guy who doesn't die?"
• Subverted in Night of the Demons in which the Comedy Black Man, apparently a minor character in the beginning, eventually rescues The Final Girl, becomes the hero, and survives the movie.

• In Resident Evil: Extinction, the only black guy was the first to be attacked by a zombie, resulting in an ultimately fatal wound. Of course he covers it up and endangers his fellow zombie apocalypse survivors. Not to mention his black girlfriend managed to sacrifice her own life, and on a bus no less. To top it off, the same character managed to survive all the way through the previous movie, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, despite being a minor character and the Ethnic Scrappy.
• Possibly intentionally lampshaded in another deep-sea creature feature, Leviathan: Ernie Hudson bravely survives 90 minutes of battling the unholy result of a top-secret Soviet experiment on the bottom of the sea... after which, as he, Peter Weller and The Girl make it to the safety of the surface, the monster returns and offs him 2 minutes before the end credits. Still a good way to go, especially considering who avenges his demise.
• The original Dawn of the Dead also inverts this trope, but takes a somewhat different tack: this time around, the only black guy is one of the two survivors, and he manages to escape with his life. This was changed at the last minute from the original plot ending, where the last two surviving humans in the mall choose to commit suicide. Meanwhile, the 2004 Dawn remake had two major black characters. One goes crazy when his pregnant wife turns into a zombie, and gets shot. The other survives to the Bolivian Army Ending.
• The cult film Straight to Hell by Alex Cox averts the trope by leaving only the black guy alive among the film's many male characters.
•Will Smith isn't even immune to this trope in a movie he's the lead in. Witness I Am Legend. Sure, 99% of the population has died by the time the show starts, and various Dark Seekers and animals, but Robert Neville is the first immune human to bite it. Admittedly, on his own terms, but still... ◦ It is notable however that in the Alternate ending, he actually lives, but with a much bleaker look for mankind as a whole.