Nine Hollywood Tropes Moviegoers Loathe: Part One

This is part one of a nine-part series. The tone is a little sarcastic, but don't let the cynicism detract from the humor.

When moviegoers see that films like Gigli were ever made, it’s a wonder people go to the theater at all. I mean, nowadays the trade-off is shafting your unborn son of his college education just to check out a movie a month and wash it down with some over-iced soda.
Despite that and the inevitable whining of every MPAA mouthpiece claiming the industry’s in fiscal turmoil, people still love the movies. Hell, I’ve turned my nose at every gas station that dares charge me a 30 cent convenience fee - never to return - and yet I’m so sell-out at the movie theater that George Foreman hangs his head in shame.
However, this perpetual dedication comes at a small price: the right to tell Hollywood producers how moronic some movie tropes have become and how they do little more than tick off the regulars by messing with our immersion worse than that jerk who actually answers his cell phone mid-climax. (May he suffer a face-plant sometime soon).

1. Killing off the predecessor hero in the first two seconds of the sequel

You know the feeling: you spend an entire movie slipping into the mind of the hero. You feel his pain, you crouch right beside him as he escapes death time and again. You hold you breathe as the killer stalks our hero, but you cry in victory when the hero beats the odds and walks into the sunset a bloody, victorious icon of tenacity.
And what does Hollywood do? They kill the guy in the first scene of some crappy sequel ‘cause they couldn’t scrape up the budget to pay the old star to come back.
I didn’t think I’d even like Hostel only to get fully engrossed as the protagonist narrowly escapes and even gets a little payback a la a bathroom stall shankfest. He was scared; he was maimed and in pain and he suffered, and yet he survived…until Hostel II that is, where he ate it 3 minutes in and ended up a trophy on some schmuck’s wall who wasn’t even in the first one.
Same with filmmakers sidestepping neuvo James Bond-esque Xander Cage in lame sequel XXX: State of the Union by having someone just pop up and say Xander was killed in some far-off country. We’d just seen him in XXX surviving every one-in-a-million shot scenario in the book, but yeah, sure, he was offed like a tired dog with nothing more said about him than you would an extra falling off of a wall to his death.
And there wasn’t an ‘80s kid alive who didn’t love it when Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character in Kickboxer started whopping some Tong Po ass, only to see some scab playing him take a bullet to the head in the abortion that was Kickboxer II.
Do us a favor, have your crummy sequels all you want, but leave the original guys out of it if you can’t spring for the bucks to bring them back.

Check out Nine Hollywood Tropes Moviegoers Loathe: Part Two