16 movie characters who refused to stay dead

Even if you went into well aware of Thanos’ comic book history, you were probably still a bit shocked when Marvel actually went through with the Snap. To make things more shocking, Marvel then simply ended the film with Thanos as the winner and the Avengers sapped of half their strength, including Winter Soldier, Spider-Man, Falcon, Black Panther, and more. Of course, we had to know they would all eventually come back, but just as they did with the deaths, Marvel planned out a particularly spectacular resurrection scene, capped off by Captain America saying an iconic line, Thor’s hammer in hand. Just thinking about it is enough to get your fist pumping.

Emperor Palpatine never really went away, thanks to constant Star Wars stories exploring the character’s life in the decades following his demise in Return Of The Jedi. Still, a full-fledged return by the original trilogy’s Big Bad wasn’t anything anyone anticipated when the trailer for first dropped. As soon as that evil laugh hit, we knew we were in for something strange and creepy, and thanks to Ian McDiarmid’s fully committed reprise performance, we got it. The rest of the movie is up for debate, but McDiarmid’s Palpatine never lost a step, even in a rotting clone body.

Speaking of characters who’ve been waiting since Return Of The Jedi to make their comeback, here comes Boba Fett. The character had been resurrected before, on the page and even in a Robot Chicken special, but his return in the second season of marked the first time the character had been given a canonical onscreen resurrection in the almost 40 years since his death. It worked so well that he got his own spinoff.

Sung Kang’s performance as street racer/Toretto crew member Han Lue was so good that he’s died onscreen twice and somehow kept coming back. We watched his car blow up in Tokyo Drift, then the sequels turned into prequels to that movie so Han could come back and have more adventures alongside Dom. We watched him blow up again (same car) in Fast & Furious 6, and “Justice for Han” was such a solid battle cry among fans that saw him return once more, complete with a story about faking his death that ensures he’ll keep fighting right up until the end of this saga.

Well, The Oracle told us at the end of The Matrix Revolutions that we might see Neo again, and while it took almost 20 years, she was (as always) correct. Written and directed by Lana Wachowski, reunited Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss for the first time since Revolutions. The film reimagines Neo as a frustrated, possibly hallucinating game programmer who’s having faint memories of his life as the One. Once he’s awakened to his true reality (again), Neo learns that his fate is actually part of a complex Machine scheme to solve an energy crisis by keeping him alive but suppressing his true nature. It’s all very Matrix-y, and despite the film’s mixed reception, seeing Reeves back as Neo was a dream for Millennials everywhere.

There’s a saying in comics: “No one stays dead except Uncle Ben.” It’s fitting that this is a reference to Spider-Man, who’s had pretty much every character in his life except his beloved uncle killed off and then brought back to life at some point or another. On the big screen, this most recently took the form of , a dimension-hopping adventure that used the concept of the multiverse to resurrect Spider-Man villains, namely Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), and Electro (Jamie Foxx). That they all came back in a single movie was thrilling enough, but it was even more satisfying to watch three different Spider-Men work together to save these bad guys’ lives, while trying to make their own lives better along the way.

From the moment we met him in Avatar back in 2009, Stephen Lang’s Miles Quaritch just felt like the kind of guy you could never truly kill, a living, breathing embodiment of the military-industrial complex who would keep pursuing victory, no matter the cost. So it made sense when the character returned in , not just revived, but in a new Na’vi body. Seeing Quaritch looking like the enemy he’d spent so many years fighting was the surprising part, but given how much that guy is willing to do in order to win a fight, it makes perfect sense.

You just can’t keep anyone dead in the Fast & Furious movies, at least not if they’re a devoted member of the Toretto crew. Whether they’re riding off into the sunset forever or just playing dead for a few movies, those characters always find a way to survive. Case in point: Gisele Yashar, who followed her lover Han Lue into resurrection with a cameo at the end of , revealing that she did not in fact die in Fast & Furious 6 as we previously thought. Gisele and Han will no doubt be back together again soon, but what Gisele was up to in the intervening years remains a mystery.