I know that people used to die in the movies. I’ve seen it.

In Jaws, the shark bit Quint in half. There was no getting him back. Just a final scream, some crushed ribs, and a bellyful of gristle for the great white. It was final. It was brutal. It was the movies.

But that was then.

Now? Quint’s probably getting his own prequel series. A gritty reimagining of his years aboard the USS Indianapolis, starring some Chris or Hemsworth or hybrid of both. Death doesn’t end stories anymore—it greenlights them.

Dying, in Hollywood, has become non-lethal.

You can blame—or credit—any number of sources. The resurrection of Spock in Star Trek III. The never-ending murders of Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers. James Bond, blown to bits in one film and sipping a martini in the next.

Don’t get me started on superheroes. Dying is just part of their training montage. And with a handy multiverse, even the past need not be a nuisance.

Once, character death meant something. It was punctuation. A period. A warning that the stakes were real and the story mattered. Now it’s a comma. Or a mid-credit scene.

The shift started subtly. Serial heroes like Tarzan and Zorro in the 1930s never aged, never bled, never lost. But they weren’t killed and brought back—they simply never died.

That changed in the blockbuster era, when audiences began to accept, even expect, that no matter what happened, a franchise could retool itself.

Studios noticed. They had no reason not to. When killing off Superman in the comics sold millions, they saw something profound: death doesn’t end narrative—it extends it. It sells T-shirts. It creates buzz. It gives you a chance to “go darker” in the next one.

That’s when death stopped being a plot point and became a marketing strategy.

And maybe that’s the real change: we’ve stopped mourning our favorite characters because we know they’re not really gone. They’re on a break. Doing yoga between trilogies. Waiting for the next reboot, spinoff, or timeline retooling.

It’s not just that Hollywood doesn’t believe in death. It doesn’t need it. Not when you can resurrect anything with CGI, a new actor, or a well-funded nostalgia campaign.

So yes, people still die in the movies. But only the extras. Only the ones without merchandise.

Quint? He didn’t die. He just hasn’t been retooled yet.

And when he does return, I bet he’s got a revenge story. And streaming residuals.