Lando Calrissian: You killed Aurra Sing.
Tobias Beckett: Pushed her. Pretty sure the fall killed her.
Tobias Beckett: Pushed her. Pretty sure the fall killed her.
— Solo
When it comes to characters dying by falling from a great height, this is usually reserved for villains, whether by circumstance or their own actions.
Then you have people who deliberately drop people to their death.
There are various platforms that can be used as a drop zone, including cliffs, mountains, treetops, bridges, roofs, balconies, elevator shafts, mine shafts, railings, staircases, industrial chimneys, observation decks, windows, aircraft, or spacecraft. A character can also achieve this by resorting to Cut the Safety Rope, and, in a variant, villains who can fly or teleport high into the air can drop victims to their deaths without relying on a tall structure.
High altitude homicide can be one of the many modi operandi used by fictional organized criminals or tyrannical governments to murder rivals or even civilians. While this is often used by villains, it's also frequently employed by heroes, as it's easy to combine with a Gory Discretion Shot, create plausible deniability around it being an accident or necessary choice, plus the potential for Uncertain Doom / Never Found the Body to make the hero look better and ensure Joker Immunity.
Subtrope of Stage Fatality. Subtrope of Disney Villain Death (for falling to death in general, especially as a villain). Supertrope to Railing Kill (for being tossed or pushed over a guard rail), Death Flight (for being tossed out of aircraft), Unhand Them, Villain! (for when a villain invokes exact words as an excuse to drop someone to death), and Chute Sabotage (for having a parachute deliberately sabotaged with murderous intent). Sister Trope to High-Altitude Interrogation (for someone being frightened into giving up information by hanging them off somewhere high) and Thrown Out the Airlock (for being tossed out of spacecraft). Contrast with Death from Above where something is dropped from a great height to kill someone below, and Death in the Clouds where a victim is killed while aboard a passenger flight. Often involves a Neck Lift. Closely related to Literal Cliff Hanger and a frequent outcome of a Climbing Climax, as both often lead to someone getting pushed off of something. Not to be confused with Thrown from the Zeppelin. Compare Meteor Move (when one combatant knocks their opponent to the air, then brings them back to the ground)
As a Death Trope, this page is Spoilers Off
I got the drop on these examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Case Closed: The Night Baron Case has the victim dropped from a fairly high hotel room and landing on the sword-wielding statue in the courtyard; during The Summation, it's noted that the impalement was unlikely, but falling on the ground would have killed him too.
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: During the Red-Light District Arc, Omitsu, manager of the Kyogoku House, confronts the oiran Warabihime for her cruel behavior and bullying that has driven one of the girls to suicide. She realizes Warabihime reminds her of stories she heard about many beautiful and cruel oirans throughout history who suspiciously all looked and behaved in the same manner, before putting two and two together. Warabihime reveals herself to be the demon Daki, and kills Omitsu for her discovery by dropping her off a roof to her death.
- In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing Lady Une assassinates General Septum by dropping him out of an airplane and shooting him in the head.
Comic Books
- Indirectly done so in Astonishing X-Men (2004): At the start of the second arc, student Wing generates a simulated ravine in the Danger Room to test if he still has powers. His teammate Hisako Ichiki appears behind him and convinces him to jump. Wing trusts Hisako's words and jumps to his death. "Hisako Ichiki" is actually a projection by the Danger Room itself, which has gained sapience and, as Arc Villain, will threaten the X-Men.
- The Clone Saga: In the mini-series Spider-Man: Redemption, Elizabeth Tyne/Janine Godbe returns to Ben Reilly's life and explains that Kaine faked her death when both were living like a couple in Salt Lake City: Kaine took her to a bridge and mentioned that Gwen Stacy, Peter's former love interest, was thrown off a bridge like that. The present-day sequence intersperses Kaine throwing Janine off the bridge and her falling in the water with her explanation of how she survived and Kaine forged a goodbye letter to fool Ben.
- King in Black: Confronting Venom, Knull rips the symbiote off of Eddie Brock and contemptuously drops him off the roof of the Empire State Building. Despite Eddie trying to slow his fall and Spider-Man's best efforts to catch him, Eddie pancakes a car and is fatally injured, dying not long after despite—and in part due to—Iron Man trying to resuscitate him with a captured symbiote dragon.
- The Maze Agency: In #16, a Theme Serial Killer is targeting a group of authors and murdering them in ways connected to their books. The author of a sci-fi novel titled The Falling Man is murdered by being shoved off a balcony.
- Spider-Man: In "The Night Gwen Stacy Died", the Green Goblin successfully tries to kill Gwen Stacy by dropping her from a great height, causing Spider-Man no shortage of grief/angst. Similar situations arise in other Spider-Man adaptations.
- Uncanny X-Men (2011): During the "Schism" storyline, Kade Kilgore kills his father by throwing him out of their flying car and shooting him in the head on the way down.
Fan Works
- Attempted in the My Hero Academia fic Bad Dads of Aldera
. Villains kidnap Midoriya while All Might is training him before the entrance exam, and they think he's going to get more people hurt trying to be a hero without a quirk. They find out All Might is on the case as one is a police officer and decide to kill Midoriya while making it look like he committed suicide by jumping off a building. Fortunately All Might shows up in time. They push Midoriya but All Might uses his Not Quite Flight and a little building-to-building Le Parkour to catch him and get safely to the ground.
- Zootopia fanfic Born to Be Wilde: After holding her family hostage, Count Reynard kills Lady Lang by kicking her out of the window of her office building.
- A Darker Path:
- Atropos ends the leadership of the Fallen by shoving them off a three-storey roof, to land headfirst on a concrete planter box forty feet below.
"Wh—where are Valefor and Mama Mathers?" asked one.
I grinned tightly under my mask.
"They fell." - Defied when her power indicates that tossing a drug dealer out the window will break his neck and kill him; she had promised to give him a chance to live if he behaved himself. So she adjusts her grip before throwing him, and the landing merely gives him several broken bones.
- Atropos ends the leadership of the Fallen by shoving them off a three-storey roof, to land headfirst on a concrete planter box forty feet below.
- Kill Them All: Taylor and Loki approach the orbit of Cannibal Earth, and she notices that about twenty cannibals are approaching the colony she's set up. She proceeds to telekinetically pick one up — two hundred feet up — and drop him, while chatting with Loki about his age. By the time the first cannibal lands, the rest have all been impaled by her bone control and he's skewered on the results.
- Move Aside, Make Way for Ultra Despair (crossover between Danganronpa and Fireman Sam): As his Ultimate Punishment for murdering Elvis and Helen, Tom is thrown out of a plane. He attempts to latch onto a nearby parachuting Monokuma, but it explodes, and he ultimately falls to his death.
- Worm fanfic Trump Card: When it becomes clear that Taylor and her immensely valuable power won't be recruited into the Wards, or even favorably disposed toward the Protectorate, because of Shadow Stalker's presence, Alexandria takes matters into her own hands — putting electrical cuffs on Shadow Stalker, yanking her so far up into the atmosphere that she breaks out into goosebumps, and giving her An Offer You Can't Refuse, to either confess everything she's done and accept the punishment, or be dropped.
Alexandria: It will be a tragic case of a misguided escape attempt. I tried to catch you, but you'd fallen too far, and the deceleration snapped your neck.
Films — Animation
- Coco: When Imelda is going to give her petal blessing to Miguel, Ernesto grabs the kid because he doesn't want him to return to the Living World with Hector's picture. Unaware that he's being recorded, Ernesto admits he killed Hector to get the credits for his music and tosses Miguel from the top of his building. Fortunately, Miguel is saved by Pepita.
- The Lion King (1994): Scar drops Mufasa off a cliff before convincing Mufasa's heir Simba of the latter's own guilt. Scar later attempts to murder a now-adult Simba by suspending him over the edge of Pride Rock. He then confesses that he was the one who threw Mufasa to his death, but this gives Simba the motivation to jump back up and beat the ever-loving crap out of him.
- Monsters, Inc.: Randall tries to shove Sully off a door that is suspended hundreds of feet in the air with lethal intent. However, Boo is having none of it, and she beats the crap out of Randall so that Sully can pull himself back up to safety.
- Sing 2: Jimmy Crystal attempts this twice with Buster; once on his roof, where he's interrupted at the last second, and then on a catwalk, where Rosita manages to save Buster. It's also subtly implied that he has dropped other people from the roof of his building before.
Films — Live-Action
- 300:
- It's stated early on that when a Spartan is born, the baby is inspected to make sure it's strong and healthy. If it isn't, it's thrown off a cliff to die.
- A Persian messenger arrives in Sparta, demanding Leonidas submit to Xerxes and provide a gift of "earth and water" as a sign of submission. Leonidas' response is to punt him into a deep well.
- Batman Film Series
- Batman (1989): Joker obliquely alludes to having killed his moll Alicia by dropping her out a window.
- Batman Returns:
- Max Shreck tries to do this to Selina for knowing too much about his plans for the power plant, sending her out a high-story window. She gets better.
- Penguin frames Batman for murder by spooking the "Ice Princess" off of a roof to her death using a swarm of bats.
- Batman Forever: Edward Nygma disposes of his interfering boss Fred Stickley by pushing him through a large office window while tied to a chair, dropping him into Gotham Harbor. Later, he tries forcing Batman into a Sadistic Choice by dropping Robin and Chase Meridian into a watery pit to see which he'll save, but the Dark Knight averts the trope by rescuing both of them.
- The Boys from Brazil: One of the Nazi assassins murderers a surveyor—who turns out to be a former Nazi living under an assumed identity—by throwing him off the wall of a dam.
- Commando: In order to find the whereabouts of the villain who's holding his daughter captive, John Matrix takes a Mook called Sulley, and holds him upside-down over a cliff by his ankle. After obtaining the equipment on Sully's person that can help him track said villain down, Matrix reminds Sulley of an earlier conversation they had, when he promised to kill Sulley last because he was a "funny guy". He then says, "I Lied," and drops Sulley off the cliff.
- Darkman: The villain Strack falls from the scaffolding of a skyscraper while trying to kill Darkman, but Darkman catches him. Strack then dares Darkman to drop him, believing Darkman is too much of a hero to do it. Strack unfortunately doesn't realize that Darkman is an early version of a '90s Anti-Hero.
- D-Day: Ivan interrogates Stasik, one of the henchmen who abducted his daughter, by holding Stasik over a construction site's tall balcony... by the dong. While the latter is wearing only his swimming trunks. And then Stasik slips out of his trunks and falls to his death in the nude.
- Die Hard 1 has the often parodied shot of Hans Gruber from the front as he falls backwards to his death when John McClane manages to throw him from the skyscraper roof after their final confrontation.
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): During the final showdown in Boston's burning ruins, King Ghidorah tries to kill Godzilla by lifting him up to the stratosphere with his two intertwining tails before dropping him onto the ground. Godzilla survived, but he was heavily hurt from the impact, requiring Mothra to intervene by protecting him from King Ghidorah's Gravity Beams. This act of bravery cost Mothra her own life, but her essence is enough to give Godzilla the power he needs to become Burning Godzilla and deliver the killing blow against King Ghidorah.
- In The Grand Budapest Hotel, Zero pushes Jopling, the menacing goon who's been stalking him and Gustave the whole film, off a cliff at the top of a snowy mountain - after Jopling has Gustave in a Literal Cliffhanger situation, intending to do the same.
- The Hitman's Bodyguard: Kincaid finally kills Big Bad Dukhovitch by kicking him off the roof of the International Criminal Court after foiling his escape attempt.
- James Bond film series:
- Goldfinger: Auric Goldfinger's subordinate Kisch is thrown down a stairwell to his death by fellow subordinate Oddjob when, in an attempt to save his own skin, Kisch tries to disarm a bomb which Goldfinger set up.
- A View to a Kill: One of the investors that Big Bad Max Zorin invites to hear his Evil Plan chooses to have nothing to do with it. Zorin tells the man to wait in the lounge while the others receive further briefing. As the man descends the stairs, The Dragon May Day activates a Surprise Slide Staircase that dumps the man out a hatch. It's then revealed that the meeting is being held aboard Zorin's Cool Airship, so the man is left to plummet several thousand feet without a parachute. Watch that last step, Mac, it's a lulu.
- The Living Daylights: An assassin cuts the rope of James Bond's fellow MI6 agent 004 on a cliff in order to kill him.
- The Jungle Book (2016): After Akela decides that Mowgli must leave the jungle and go to live in the Man-Village to be safe from Shere Khan, the tiger- who ran into and attacked Mowgli in a buffalo field earlier- confronts him for his actions. When Akela states that the man-cub has left the jungle behind, and therefore Khan no longer has any need to fight with the wolf-pack, Shere Khan gets up as though he's about to leave peacefully...Only to suddenly turn around, grab Akela, and throw the wolf leader over the cliff to his death. Because Shere Khan doesn't want Mowgli gone from the jungle, he wants him dead, and now he's going to take over Akela's pack and keep the wolves under his control until news of Akela's murder draws Mowgli back out again.
- Monty Python's The Meaning of Life: In the "Death" sketch, Graham Chapman's character Arthur Jarrett has been sentenced to death and been allowed to choose the means of his execution. He chooses to be chased off the Cliffs of Dover by a crowd of women wearing nothing but G-strings, bike helmets, and skating pads, and faceplants straight into his own grave.
- In New Jack City, Big Bad Nino Brown's Establishing Character Moment has him and his muscle about to drop a corrupt businessman to his death from the Brooklyn Bridge over a drug deal gone wrong. As the man pleads for his life, Nino sarcastically wishes him goodbye and lets him plummet.
- The Pianist: In one particularly disturbing scene, a group of Nazis enter a Jewish house and casually murder the occupants; the wheelchair-bound patriarch is murdered by wheeling him onto the balcony and tipping him out over the edge.
- Planet of the Apes (Chernin Series):
- Rise of the Planet of the Apes: After Buck dies crashing Steven Jacobs's helicopter, when Jacobs attempts to beg Caesar for help, Caesar walks away and lets Koba kick what's left of Jacobs's helicopter off the Golden Gate Bridge with Jacobs still inside, killing him.
- Dawn of the Planet of the Apes:
- Koba throws Ash over a ledge to his death for refusing to kill a human.
- Caesar drops Koba to his death from a skyscraper over his treachery after a rooftop confrontation, calling him "not ape", when Koba tries to throw his philosophy of apes not killing each other in his face.
- Revenge of the Sith: Palpatine uses his Force Lightning to electrocute Mace Windu and send him plummeting to his death twenty stories below.
- SHAZAM! (2019): Attempted when Billy Batson (in his superhero form) confronts Dr. Sivana for the first time. After Billy pisses off Sivana with a sneaky Groin Attack, Sivana retaliates by performing a Neck Lift on Billy and lifting him into the clouds before punching him back down. Luckily, Billy's flight powers started manifesting a second before he hits the ground and he begins floating... then a passing truck runs him over.
- Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland: Angela ties Cindy's hands and blindfolds her, before leading her to a flagpole. Angela then attaches a clip to Cindy's belt, uses the flag cable to hoist her to the top, and then drops her to her death.
- Stuart Little 2: The Falcon attempts to kill Stuart by dropping him from high in the air. "I'm not going to kill him! The sidewalk will!"
- Subverted in The Third Man. The Big Bad brings Martins onto a Ferris Wheel to monologue about their evil plan and motivations in relative privacy, but also potentially shove Martins off to his death since He Knows Too Much. Martins, realizing the danger he's in, informs them that the cops already know what they're up to, so killing him wouldn't actually change anything, and everyone would know what happened if he were to "suddenly" die or go missing. Acknowledging the point, the villain allows Martins to leave the fairgrounds alive.
- The Untouchables (1987): Prohibition Officer Eliot Ness is arresting Frank Nitti on a high rooftop, but when Nitti makes one taunt too many, Ness decides to simply shove him off the edge and be done with it.
Nitti: I said that your friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Now you think about that when I beat the rap.
[Ness grabs him by the shoulder and tosses him off, with Frank screaming the whole fall]
Ness: DID HE SOUND ANYTHING LIKE THAT!? - X-Men: First Class: Azazel lays waste to a CIA base by using his high-speed teleportation powers to pop up to an enemy, grabbing them, teleporting both of them at least a hundred feet into the air, then teleporting only himself away to do the same thing to another agent seconds later, allowing gravity to do the rest of the dirty work.
Gamebooks
- All-Day Nightmare: In the book's Secret Agent route, you're a junior agent investigating a covert teleporter project called a "Matter Slammer", developed by the Mad Scientist Dr. Sloper, who attempts eliminating you for knowing too much about her invention by teleporting you a hundred miles into the air without a parachute. You could, however, turn this around on Dr. Sloper, and teleport her using her own device and eliminate her instead. You drop a Bond One-Liner in the good ending where you defeat Sloper by teleporting her into the stratosphere (presumably to her death).
"Well, she was highly dangerous!"
- Suspects: You are a detective called on to investigate the murder of a film director, who was pushed through the exit door of a train, as the train crossed a bridge over a deep ravine. The murderer occasionally tries to kill you in the same way.
Literature
- The Belgariad:
- The fight between the rival secret agents Silk and Brill ends abruptly when Silk catches Brill in a martial arts throw and tosses him off the parapet of a mountaintop city.
Belgarath: What was he doing this time?
Silk: Trying to fly, last time I saw him. He wasn't doing it very well. - Overlapping with Psychic-Assisted Suicide, Polgara inflicts a Poke in the Third Eye on one enemy sorcerer in the form of horrific visions that compel him to jump from his mountaintop citadel.
- Defied in Polgara the Sorceress when Polgara finds her deathly ill sister suffering Comically Inept Healing from a priest. She furiously teleports the priest high into the sky above the city, but her mother orders her not to kill him, so she simply leaves him floating there for the rest of the day.
- The fight between the rival secret agents Silk and Brill ends abruptly when Silk catches Brill in a martial arts throw and tosses him off the parapet of a mountaintop city.
- Captain Underpants: Discussed in book 8. George and Harold's Evil Counterparts hypnotize Crackers and Sulu into killing the real George and Harold. Crackers starts to attack the duo, but Crackers picks them up and flies them into the sky. Harold falsely believes Crackers is going to drop them to their death, but "he" doesn't. This foreshadows the fact that Crackers is actually a girl, as it had been previously established that females always do the opposite of what they're told when they're hypnotized in this universe.
- The Famous Five: Threatened in Five Fall into Adventure, by the mad villain Red Tower. When he believes the police are on to him, he resolves to take George away in his helicopter. He suddenly snarls at Julian "I'd take you with us, if there was room, and drop you into the sea!"
- Discussed in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. After Harry was pursued by his enemy Stan Shunpike on a broomstick, Harry justifies not stunning him, saying that had he done so, Stan would have fallen and died, the same as if he had killed him using the curse Avada Kedavra.
- His Dark Materials: Played with when, at the end, Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter make a Heroic Sacrifice to drag the nigh-unkillable angel Metatron into the Void Between the Worlds where he'll fall forever.
- N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy: The Empire gives condemned heretics a choice — jump from the top of the palace, or get slowly cooked alive by the executioner's cursed halberd.
- Kinsey Millhone series, V Is for Vengeance: Cappi Dante, the brother of Loan Shark Lorenzo Dante, throws one of his brother's debtors from a parking garage, despite his own brother's objections. Cappi is indicated to have done this to multiple debtors, among others.
- Saintess Summons Skeletons: Sofia's first kill involves tackling the Magisterium with a pack of zombies and having them all fall off the platform they were fighting on, so far down that she can't see the bottom of the pit. Sofia herself survives because her [Way of the Fool] skill prevents her from falling off things if she doesn't want to. Much later, while flying, she remembers the incident when speculating on whether she herself could survive the fall if she just folded her wings and crashed, but her best guess is that being at a much higher level than the Magisterium was, she would be tough enough to make it.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: The Moon Door at the Eyrie in the Vale is the preferred execution method of House Arryn, which involves dropping the victim from a door opening to the sky high up in the mountains and letting gravity do the rest. In A Storm of Swords, Petyr Baelish pushes his new wife, Lysa, out the Moon Door after she catches him kissing her niece Sansa.
- The Stormlight Archive: One of Szeth's combat tactics when he fights outdoors is to launch enemies high into the air with his Gravity Master power, then turn it off.
- The Wheel of Time: In a downplayed example, Mat's team dispose of an Anti-Magic Immortal Assassin by luring it into a Gateway with no exit, leaving it to fall forever through the Void Between the Worlds.
- Where Eagles Dare: Smith's high-altitude fight on top of a cable car ends when he rigs the car with plastic explosives and gets clear, blowing up its connection to the cable and dropping it (with both its occupants) into the valley far below.
Live-Action TV
- The Brittas Empire: In "Assassin", Larry, pissed at Brittas' presence at the local choir causing numbers to drop, plans to kill him by electrocuting him off the roof of the leisure centre building. He changes his mind when Brittas tells him that he plans to step away from the choir, at which point, he accidentally sits on the trap intended to do the murderous deed and is sent hurtling off the roof himself.
- Cold Case, "A Perfect Day": Police Officer and Domestic Abuser Roger Mulvaney is exposed posthumously as having thrown his daughter off a bridge to her death while he was still alive.
- CSI: NY:
- "Three Generations Are Enough": Two brothers have schizophrenia, and one's girlfriend is pregnant. The other brother kills the woman by tossing her from the roof of the church where she worked because he was afraid the baby would have the same condition.
- "Dancing with the Fishes": A young woman enters a tramway car, interrupting a murder in progress. The killer tosses her out the door, and she crash-lands on the windshield of a car passing below. The impact kills her.
- Dept. Q: No longer needing to use his identity, Lyle Jennings murders Sam Haig this way. Taking advantage of the fact Sam enjoyed climbing as a hobby, he lures him out to the cliff face then bludgeons him with a rock, then after dressing the still conscious but paralysed Haig in the appropriate attire, he throws him off the top of the cliff, banking on the investigators putting it down to a tragic accident.
- EastEnders:
- Janine marries Barry Evans in the belief that he's dying of a heart condition and she'll soon inherit his wealth. When he turns out to be fine, she instead settles for shoving him off a cliff during the honeymoon and then untying his shoelaces to Make It Look Like an Accident.
- Andy Hunter is killed by Johnny Allen, who throws him off a motorway overpass.
- After learning that Stella has been abusing his son Ben, Phil confronts her on a rooftop with every intention of killing her, and it cuts to Stella's body landing on a parked car. Eventually subverted when CCTV footage reveals Stella jumped rather than give Phil the satisfaction of killing her.
- Gotham:
- "The Ballonman": The titular "Balloonman" attaches his victims to a weather balloon, causing them to float until the balloon deflates, causing their deaths.
- "All Happy Families are Alike": Oswald Cobblepot shoves his former boss Fish Mooney off the same roof where they had a climactic confrontation, seemingly killing her. Fish's death does not stick.
- Highlander: Intended but doesn’t actually happen in Leader of the Pack. Richie spots the junkie who killed Duncan’s lover Tessa and he’s set on revenge. Despite Duncan telling him to let it go, Richie chases the guy up several flights of a high-rise apartment building and dangles him over the edge, threatening to let go. But when he finds out the guy can’t even remember doing it and had a pregnant girlfriend, his conscience-and likely Duncan’s words-get the better of him, and he hauls the guy back in.
- Jack Taylor, "The Dramatist": "The Dramatist", Professor Eugene Gorman, throws one of his first apparent victims off a roof, before having Private Eye Jack Taylor investigate.
- Kamen Rider Agito: this is the modus operandi of some of the Unknown/Lords. The Snake Lords use Thinking Up Portals on their victims, while Crow Lords just straight-up grab their targets and takes off to the sky before letting go.
- Monk Played with in the episode "Mr. Monk Goes to Mexico" where Monk goes to Mexico to investigate what appears to be an impossible case: a young American drowning in midair while skydiving. The Reveal is somewhat more mundane: The medical examiner cut the victim's parachute cord and fabricated the drowning, specifically to bait Monk to investigate the crime, as such a strange murder is his specialty. Monk was the true target all along
- Mr. Robot: In Season 4, when Dom is forced into her new role as the Dark Army double agent in the FBI, her first assignment is to pin Santiago as a mole for a drug cartel during her interrogation by Agent Horton. When Dom tells Janice that he may have bought the story "99%", the latter orders the Dark Army to kill him by throwing him off the building and making it look like suicide, to which she tells Dom to "keep it 100% next time".
- The Penthouse: War in Life: This happens to two of the main characters. It starts off with Min Seol-Ah being murdered by a blackout drunk Oh Yoonhee when she throws her off the balcony from the top floor of Hera Palace so that she could get Bae Ro Na into Cheonga School of Arts. And in a sense of Bookends, in the final season Yoonhee herself is murdered by Cheon Seo Jin when the latter pushes the car onto her and causes her to call off a cliff into the ocean.
- Power Rangers Wild Force: Zig-zagged in "The Master's Last Stand", where a powerless Master Org/Viktor Adler is thrown off a cliff by the treacherous General Mandilok. While this seems to kill him, it instead reawakens his true power.
- Return of Ultraman: One of Ultraman Jack's special moves, the Ultra Throw, is performed by having Jack snatch an enemy, lift them into the stratosphere, and flinging them over his head so they land fatally with extreme force, best demonstrated against Alien Nackle at the conclusion of the "Ultraman Dies At Twilight!" two-parter. This attack has re-appeared in the Ultraman Fighting Evolution series of games for players using Jack.
- The Sopranos: Mikey Palmice and Joseph Marino drop drug dealer "Rusty Irish" from the Great Falls bridge on Junior Soprano's orders.
- The Strain: In "The Master", a rejuvenated Eldritch Palmer shows his newfound strength by nonchalantly tossing Margaret Pierson off a skyscraper balcony to her death, which conveniently looks like a suicide.
- Torchwood, "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang": John Hart drops a mugger over the edge of a high multi-story car parking structure to his death. He also throws Jack off of an office building to what he thinks is Jack's death when Jack refuses to join him in his domination of the stars, unaware that Jack has Resurrective Immortality.
Music
- Dan Bull ends his Enderman Rap (which was centered around the Enderman mob from Minecraft) with the Enderman who is singing dropping the human character off a cliff.
Podcasts
- The Magnus Archives: This is a very common MO of Avatars of The Vast. One of them, Micheal Crew, admits that he's dropped so many people off of skyscrapers and into a never-ending void that when Jon asks about a specific one, he can't remember them.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons: The Kenku carry out executions by hurling their condemned from tall buildings. This is actually a reminder of the fact that they had wings.
- Mindtrap: One puzzle is about a blindfolded tightrope walker who is walking to music, and suddenly falls to his death, by being murdered. This is done by the conductor prematurely stopping the music, and the walker believes he has reaches the end of his rope, steps off, and the platform he thinks should be there is not.
Theatre
- Urinetown: The titular Urinetown is used as a threat to keep people from breaking the draconian Bathroom Control rules in the musical's setting. However, this is revealed to be a Released to Elsewhere situation, where "sending them to Urinetown" is a euphemism for killing the rule breakers. Protagonist rebellion leader Bobby Strong is dropped from the top of the Urine Good Company building in "Why Did I Listen to my Heart", dying soon after.
Video Games
- Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood: In the final battle along the castle walls of Viana, Cesare Borgia boasts that no man could kill him. Ezio quips that he will therefore leave Cesare "in the hands of Fate" and drops him off the castle walls to his death.
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: The Daedric Prince Sheogorath performs executions by teleporting the condemned several thousand feet above a rocky outcrop. As a meta bonus, the impact is a scripted death that overrides even God Mode.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: One of the more common uses of the FUS RO DAH (Unrelenting Force) shout is to send enemies off ledges or cliffs to the ground below.
- Final Fantasy XIV:
- In the post-Heavensward story, Simeonard, a member of the True Brothers of the Faith, pushes his hostage, a commoner girl named Maelie, off the basilica of the Vault. He blames Aymeric's restructuring of Ishgard's government for her impending doom. It's subverted when Vidofnir swoops in to catch Maelie at the last second.
- In Shadowbringers, Ran'jit's adjutant attempts to bargain with the Scions so they can all escape the Death Trap they find themselves in within the Qitana Ravel. Ran'jit is displeased by this and kicks his subordinate down the Bottomless Pit before them for daring to consort with the enemy. Thancred and Urianger attempt to return the favor by using the Rescue spell to drag Ran'jit into said pit, only for Ran'jit to inexplicably show up again completely unharmed.
Ran'jit: We do not negotiate with the enemy. The villagers' lives are forfeit. As is yours... [kicks his adjutant into the pit]
Eulmoran Adjutant: [falling to his doom] General?
- Ulpius in The Forgotten City jumps from a high cliff to his death as part of a Suicide Pact. You have to prevent this from happening to get to the Golden Ending.
- House of the Dead: The first game's second boss, the Hanged Man, is introduced in a cutscene dropping two unarmed scientists (the hostages you spend the whole game trying to rescue) a few hundred meters to their deaths while taunting you before the boss battle commences. He does the same thing in the 2021 Video Game Remake.
- Fortnite: One option to eliminate incapacitated enemy players is to pick them up and throw them from a great height, giving a unique elimination line:
Player 1 introduced Player 2 to gravity.
- Mortal Kombat
- The Stage Fatality of all incarnations of the original The Pit stage from Mortal Kombat 1 has the victor pushing the defeated into a pit full of spikes via an uppercut.
- The Stage Fatality of The Pit II in Mortal Kombat II (Evil Tower in Armageddon) is the same as the original The Pit, even being executed via uppercut, however, there are no spikes at the bottom, only floor.
- Mortal Kombat 3:
- The Stage Fatality of the Bell Tower has the victor uppercutting the defeated and the defeated falling into long spikes after crashing through many floors.
- The Stage Fatality of The Pit III has the victor uppercutting the defeated, who falls into a string of rotating bladed fans which destroy them.
- Mortal Kombat 4: The infamous sequence of endings for Sonya, Jarek, and Jax is this. In chronological order, Sonya chases Jarek to a cliff and promises to bring him to justice; he falls off the cliff, apparently, then grabs Sonya's ankle while she is radioing Jax. After dropping Sonya from the cliff, Jarek climbs up and meets Jax. The man grabs Jarek by the neck and lifts him over the cliff. Jarek begs to be spared, since Jax is threatening a suspect. Jax simply dismisses the other's pleas and drops him to his death below.
Jax: Wrong, Jarek. This is not brutality, this is fatality!
- Mortal Kombat: Deception and Mortal Kombat: Armageddon:
- The Falling Cliffs is both a kill trap and a death trap, as periodically the arena's outer rings fall by segments, with the floor of the arena being composed by spikes. Should a character be caught in one of these falling segments, it's match over for them, and sometimes both combatants can be killed, with the round victory being given to the one who had more health. However, it's also possible to push a character to said death as well.
- The death trap of the Golden Desert's lower level has the victor pushing the defeated, and the defeated falling from a high distance into a huge spike.
- The death trap of the Nexus's stage is an horizontal variation: it has the victor pushing the defeated, and the defeated being left to drift and killed in the process. A similar Death Trap is found in Armageddon in the level Outworld Spire, where we see the opponent instead being suckered into a black hole and destroyed.
- The death trap of the Quan Chi's Fortress stage has the victor pushing the defeated, and the defeated being killed by the electrical web traps in the bottom.
- The death trap of the Sky Tower's lower level, much like The Pit II, has the victor pushing the defeated, and the defeated falling to their death. Unlike other stages, there's nothing at the bottom, only floor.
- The death trap of the Bell Tower stage is mostly the same as it was back in 3, however we don't see the victor crashing through many floors (it's rather implied) and instead the defeated is impaled in the center by a single spike, with side spikes cutting them and a rat picking up one of the cut limbs.
- Mortal Kombat 9: In the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita versions, the Stage Fatality of the "Chamber of the Flame" arena has the winner necklifting the loser and then throwing them to one of three previously selected executions, via smashers, automatic axes chopping them into pieces or incineration.
- OpenArena: While pushing opponents to their deaths is an Omnipresent Trope for any Arena Shooter, the game has an Award Pushing feature that rewards the pusher with a point. When switched off, it instead subtracts a point from the unfortunate victim.
- Rise To Honor: A mobster knocks a maintenance man off of a scaffold while being pursued by Kit Yun. Kit himself has the option of knocking his opponents off of roofs in certain areas of the first level.
- Shadow Warrior 3: The game, much like the other two entries made by Flying Wild Hog, gives protagonist Lo Wang the ability to cast a pushing attack called "Chi Blast". The difference with the other two entries is that this time it can be used to push enemies out of ledges, with the game's overabundance of battle scenarios with death zones, while previous games either featured battles completely on closed/limited arenas or invisible walls.
- Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: In the reveal trailer for Kazuya Mishima as a DLC character, the cinematics have him throwing defeated members of the roster off a cliff, as a reference to his family's infamous habit. Some of the fallen members include Captain Falcon, Ganondorf, Pit, Min-Min, and Marth. He later drops Kirby off a cliff, but Kirby floats back up behind him without issue.
- Tekken:
- The Mishima Family have a familial habit of throwing each other off of high-altitude locations in multiple entries of the franchise, first started by Heihachi Mishima. He first threw his son Kazuya Mishima off a cliff to see if he was strong enough to inherit the Mishima Zaibatsunote . After Kazuya pays him back by dropping Heihachi off the same cliff in Tekken, these attempted murders escalate to absurd proportions, with Heihachi coming back to throw his kin out of a helicopter, or even space. Kazuya eventually successfully murders Heihachi with this method after a grueling fight in an active volcano, dropping his father into it in Tekken 7.Spoilers for Tekken 8
- Tekken 8: If Kazuya wins the final battle of the game's Story Mode, he carries on the family tradition and tosses his defeated son, Jin Kazama, off a cliff, seemingly killing him as well.
- Unreal Tournament 2004 has a death message whenever a player pushes another to their death: "Deathbringer pushed Fluffy over the edge.". The game's internal code calls it "ConvoyGibbed" due to its use on the Assault map AS-Convoy, however, it can still be found in many other maps.
Visual Novels
- Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth: Downplayed in Case 2. The murder is committed on a plane, and while the victim wasn’t thrown off the plane in flight, he was killed by being pushed off a platform and falling to his death.
- Robotics;Notes: Mizuka is killed when The Conspiracy remotely hacks her bionic legs and forces her to walk off a cliff.
Websites
- Neopets: The final murder in the Ski Lodge Murder Mystery plot occurred when Adam was dropped off a cliff by the killer, Maverick.
Webcomics
- Merceneiress: When Mistress Salock is convicted of treason, she chooses a sentence of "death by cliff". This turns out to consist of literally being thrown off a high cliff to her death.
- The Order of the Stick:
- Roy's dramatic confrontation with Xykon atop the back of an airborne zombie dragon ends abruptly when Xykon destroys the dragon and floats away, leaving Roy to plummet to his death.
Xykon: [to the tune of "Danny Boy"] O guy I killed, the ground, the ground is calling...
- A vampire tries to dispose of Belkar and hide the body in one go by throwing him off a mountaintop. However, that same vampire had dropped Belkar from a moving airship twice before, so he came prepared with a Feather Fall cloak that saves him.
- Roy's dramatic confrontation with Xykon atop the back of an airborne zombie dragon ends abruptly
Western Animation
- Amphibia: In "True Colors": King Andrias drops Sprig out of the window of his Ominous Floating Castle, complete with a Really Dead Montage to convince you that yes, a main character actually just got killed off in a Disney series. It's then subverted as Marcy manages to swoop down on Joe Sparrow and save Sprig at the last second.
- The Looney Tunes Show: Comically subverted in "Bugs & Daffy Get a Job". Tired of being kept awake by Daffy's snoring, Bugs suggests an idea to fix it permanently — the scene cuts to Daffy standing on the roof of a building and Bugs about to push him. However, when Daffy questions how this relates to his snoring, Bugs stops.
Daffy: How is standing on the ledge of a high-rise building going to fix my snoring?
Bugs: Oh, right. Snoring.
Real Life
- Eagles occasionally kill large animals by dropping them or dragging them off cliffs.
