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Dying Object Drop Shot - TV Tropes

  • ️Tue Jul 09 2024

Dying Object Drop Shot (trope)

"Peter Alan Tyler, the most wonderful man in the world, died 7th November 1987."

When a character dies, they'll often drop anything they were holding (or wearing, if they were vaporized). The item(s) falling to the ground may receive special focus as the character dies. Sometimes this is used as a Discretion Shot, while other times it adds drama to the moment (particularly if the item was important to the now-deceased character, or if it was fragile and shatters loudly).

This trope is often paired with a Dead-Hand Shot, symbolizing the person's lifeless body flopping to the ground. This can also be used in conjunction with Perfect Poison to show the poison taking effect.

A Sub-Trope of Dramatic Drop and Dead Hat Shot. May overlap with a Slow-Motion Drop. Not to be confused with Deadly Droplets.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga 

  • Death Note: When L dies, a shot is seen of his spoon being slow motion dropped from his hand.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: Melone dies by being bitten on the tongue by a venomous snake that Giorno’s Gold Experience created. As he collapses, the glass vial of Bucciarati’s blood in his hand falls to the floor and shatters.
  • Ya Boy Kongming!: In the manga, Kongming's original death is signified by him losing the grip on his feather fan, but the fan is still lying on his deathbed anyway. In the anime, though, he drops the fan on the floor as he dies.

Films — Animation 

  • In The Prince of Egypt, God sends His Angel of Death to kill every firstborn in Egypt as the final of the ten plagues to break King Rameses into releasing the imprisoned Hebrews. At one point, the Angel sneaks up behind an Egyptian boy carrying a jug and kills him, and there is a Dead-Hand Shot as the jug shatters on the ground.
  • In Shrek 2, the Fairy Godmother is defeated by her own magic that was reflected by Harold, resulting in her exploding in a shower of bubbles, leaving behind her broken glasses and her wand.
  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Mixed with a Dead-Hand Shot; when Snow White is tricked into eating an apple that puts her in a deep sleep, there is a shot of her hand hitting the floor as she drops the apple with one bite missing. Of course, it's subverted in that she's not actually dead.
  • In Tangled, after the mortally-wounded Eugene uses the last of his strength to cut Rapunzel's hair off with a shard of glass, the next shot is his hand dropping to the floor with the shard slipping out of it. He doesn't die right away, and ultimately comes back thanks to her tears reviving him.
  • In The Transformers: The Movie, as Optimus Prime lies dying, he tries to pass the Matrix of Leadership onto Ultra Magnus, the camera focuses on his hand which drops it before he can pass it over.

Films — Live-Action 

  • The Stinger of Avengers: Infinity War shows the Snap taking effect in New York City. Nick Fury takes out a communicator to contact someone, then notices that he's disintegrating as well. He places the call just as he disintegrates completely and the communicator falls to the sidewalk. A close-up of the screen shows who he was contacting: Captain Marvel.
  • All throughout Braveheart, William Wallace keeps ahold of an embroidered handkerchief that his dead wife Murron gave him when they were married. He clutches it intently throughout his torture and execution, only letting it drop when the executioner's axe falls, at which point there is a sequence shot from below of the handkerchief falling from his lifeless hand to the ground.
  • The beginning of Citizen Kane shows the death of the titular Charles Kane; as he dies alone in his bed and utters the now iconic last words "Rosebud...", he drops a snow globe onto the floor that shatters.
  • In the film version of Driving Miss Daisy, the viewer doesn't see Idella die, but the film cuts to the bowl of peas she was holding dropping to the floor and scattering the peas all over the place in slow motion. Given Idella's diligence as a maid, her total lack of reaction to the mess immediately clues us in that she isn't there anymore.
  • In Enchanted when Queen Nerissa tricks Giselle into eating a poison apple, in a nod to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Giselle again drops the apple as she passes out cutting to a Dead-Hand Shot and the apple rolling away and bumping against Robert's foot, whilst he is dancing with his fiancée Nancy, alerting him to what's happened. Nerissa then explains they only have until the stroke of midnight to lift the spell of Giselle will die True Love's Kiss works but not from Giselle's betrothed Prince Edward, only from Robert as they'd fallen in love.
  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: A variation; The bedridden Benjamin Lockwood confronts Eli with John Hammond's iconic amber cane next to his bedside. When Eli murders him via Vorpal Pillow, the cane falls over and shatter on the marble floor.
  • My Girl: Thomas J gets attacked by a swarm of bees. As he tries in vain to get them off, the scene cuts to a slow-motion shot of his glasses falling to the ground as bees crawl all over them. This lets the audience know that his allergy to bee stings has done him in.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl: After he is shot by Jack, and after Will drops the last Aztec medallion into the chest, Barbossa gets one moment to feel once again, then keels over. The last seen of him is him dropping an apple, previously what he'd said he would eat first after the curse was lifted.
  • Star Trek: The Motion Picture. While the V'Ger energy probe is scanning Lieutenant Ilia on the Enterprise bridge, she is holding a tricorder. When the probe finishes the scan and she is destroyed, the tricorder drops, bounces off a seat, and falls to the floor.

Live-Action TV 

  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: In the episode "Aftershocks", the Baroness drops her glass after being poisoned during a restaurant dinner.
  • On Community, Abed watches the British sitcom Cougarton Abbey to fill the void left by Cougar Town being pushed back to mid-season. He enjoys the first five episodes, then the sixth ends with the characters drinking hemlock and dying. During the death montage, there is a close-up of one character's hand as she drops the glass she drank from.
  • Doctor Who:
    • The episode "Father's Day" shows that Rose's father was killed by a hit-and-run driver, while he was carrying a vase as a wedding gift, shattering as the car hits him. When Rose saves him, the vase does not break, to indicate that he's still alive, which causes a problem when Reapers start invading the timeline. When he finally sacrifices himself to restore the Temporal Paradox that Rose created by saving him, the event is played out the same way as it did originally, only in a different position.
    • "Twice Upon a Time": As the Twelfth Doctor dies and regenerates, there is a shot of his ring falling off the now-Thirteenth Doctor's finger and hitting the TARDIS floor.
  • Firefly: Subverted in "Serenity". Mal is holding Kaylee's hand while she's recovering from surgery after being shot in the stomach. She wakes up for a bit and has a slightly loopy conversation with him, then she goes silent and limply lets go of his hand. Later, having previously threatened to throw Simon out the airlock if Kaylee didn't pull through, Mal tells Simon that Kaylee's dead. Simon bolts for the medbay... to find Kaylee awake, upright, and waving at him, because Mal was playing a prank: she'd just gone back to sleep in the previous scene.
  • Red Dwarf: As Rimmer dies in "Me2", he accidentally knocks the captain's snow globe off the table (causing it to smash on the ground), in a Shout-Out to Citizen Kane.
  • Touched by an Angel: In the episode "Psalm 151", a little boy with a terminal illness carries around a notebook with a Bucket List, one item of which was to meet Céline Dion (playing herself). He crosses each item as it's fulfilled. Toward the end of the episode, the boy's passing is depicted by him dropping the notebook; Monica promptly picks it up and draws a line through the last item on the list — "Go to heaven".

Video Games 

  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy VII: When Aerith is killed by Sephiroth, the Holy Materia she is equipped with is dropped as she collapses and it bounces away down the stairs she was at the top of, and this fall is even synchronised to the tune of her Leitmotif which plays over the scene.
    • Final Fantasy XIV: During Sultana Nanamo’s supposed death, when the poison takes hold, she drops the chalice she was drinking. When she drops to the ground, her crown clatters off her head and across the floor.
  • Kingdom Hearts II: Downplayed — after Saix is defeated, his weapon falls from his hand and vanishes. However, he actually lives on about thirty seconds after this, just long enough to turn around, stagger a few steps away, and fall to his knees, saying "Why... Kingdom Hearts... where is my heart?" before dissolving.
  • Mortal Kombat:
    • Mortal Kombat 9: Whenever Kratos is put in "Finish Him!" mode, ready to be Fatality'd, he drops his blades to the floor.
    • Mortal Kombat 11: When Kronika brought the fighters from the past — one of which was past Raiden via Time Crash — Dark Raiden is erased via Ret-Gone dropping Shinnok's amulet.
    • Mortal Kombat 1: During the "Finish Him!" phase, all the weapon-wielding users drop their weapons to the floor: Rain his staff, General Shao his battle axe, Peacemaker his helmet, Shang Tsung his claws, Kung Lao his hat, etcetera. It also happens when a character is subjected to specific brutalities.
  • Towards the final act of Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh: Therese Banning hears a strange noise inside the bondage club she works at, only to be chained up, gagged with a ball gag, and stabbed by an unknown killer, who then detaches a nearby lamp to electrocute her on her own blood. The last thing seen is the ball gag falling to the floor.
  • WarCraft III: Enemies sometimes drop items related to abilities they had, implying the abilities came from the item (e.g. a magic-immune monster dropping an item that grants spell immunity, a monster with a damage-boosting aura drops an item granting the same aura, etc.).

Western Animation 

  • Steven Universe: Usually, whenever a gem gets poofed, either through too much damage to the gem in question or hit by a destabiliser, the gem will retreat into their gemstone to heal, usually showing a shot of the now poofed gem (or gems in the case of fusions) dropping to the ground. However, in "Catch and Release", when Peridot gets poofed, she leaves behind her limb enhancers which are shown falling to the floor, and then Amethyst promptly tosses them into the sea.