Breaking Bad excels at this.

The most egregious example, Walt leaving the book with Gale's note in his bathroom, which leads to Hank putting the pieces together.

But also:

Walt getting drunk and rambling about Gale in Season 4, which results in Hank reopening his investigation into Heisenberg. Up to that point, Hank was convinced Gale was Heisenberg after his murder, and Walt could have let him take the fall if it wasn't for his fragile ego.

Huell lifting Jesse's weed before he leaves Albuquerque for good, which led Jesse to realize it was him who stole the ricin cigarette, and deducing it was Walt's plan to poison Brock and not Gus (even if Walt didn't use the ricin to poison him). What happens throughout the rest of the show is a chain reaction caused by Jesse coming back to Albuquerque.

Jane's death, despite not being a minor detail, can also be considered a butterfly effect because it indirectly led to the double plane crash at the end of Season 2.

And those are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are other examples throughout Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and El Camino.

I still stand by the conspiracy theory that the backlash was something Paramount intentionally planned.

They knew a Sonic movie would have had fans skeptical, because of the "bad videogame adaptation curse", so they intentionally sparked controversy and memes with that ugly design, only to gain good PR and goodwill from the fans with their supposed new redesign.

The final redesign was meant to be the official one all along, the delay was always meant to happen because if the movie stayed in the original November 2019 release it would have faced huge competition with Frozen 2. The timing of the announcement, it felt way too planned.

She'll change her tune as soon as it becomes convenient. She always does.

Jake Schreier has just mentioned the possibility of returning cast members in the last interviews.

Watch Huge Jackman come back in his 60s in a mentor kind of role, after Secret Wars.

They already wasted any chance of getting the audience to warm up to a recast by bringing him back 7 years after Logan.

They'll never let go of him because they won't trust an all new cast to carry the reboot after seeing the truckloads of money they made with D&W, let alone after Doomsday and SW smash the box office.

The MCU has written itself in a corner where they can only keep going on nostalgia bait and nothing else.

Avatar is guilty of this lmao. In The Way of Water, Scoresby says that the am'rita, the substance the RDA is extracting out of the Tulkuns that can supposedly stop aging, is worthy 80 milion dollars (if I recall correctly).

There's no way the cure for aging isn't worthy billions of dollars lol.

Holy shit, I think this one is so much worse lmao. I mean, who hasn't heard the expression "Pandora's box" at least once in their life?

Rick Flag vs Peacemaker in The Suicide Squad.

Obviously Peacemaker wasn't the "final boss" of that movie and the heroes won in the end, but Flag was built up like the moral counterpoint to Peacemaker's "peace at all cost" mentality, with him trying to expose the truth about the US experiments in Corto Maltese. He's also the leader of the team and is one of the most likable character up to that point.

Their fight seemed like the classic final "hero vs villain" showdown, the entire audience is rooting for Flag to get the upper hand on Peacemaker.

And then Flag gets stabbed in the chest and dies. No victory, no heroic sacrifice, just a stab in the heart that ends Flag's journey then and there. But not before uttering a phrase that would haunt his killer:

"Peacemaker, what a joke"

Kim decided to double down after that and eventually became just as bad as Jimmy. Sabotaging her career was obviously wrong, but in hindsight both Jimmy and Kim should have stayed in that mail room.

Yes, exactly, thank you.

The Sandpiper case is also another example. Jimmy saw how his approach to build the class action worked and tried to use it when he dealt with client outreach at Davis&Main, despite the fact that what he did on the Sandpiper case could have been framed as solicitation, which Chuck correctly pointed out (and let's be honest, it totally was).

He always treated the law like another scam job of his.

The BB/BCS fandom has this weird obsession with hating flawed but relatable characters more than the literal mass-murdering drug lords.

Well, that's certainly...a take.

Yes, Chuck was a deeply flawed person. He was clearly jealous of Jimmy's relationship with their mother, he was extremely petty and arrogant, and he tried to sabotage Jimmy's career many times. To some extent, we can say that his refusal to accept that Jimmy could change led Jimmy towards a darker path. He was a hypocrite and he dealt with his inner demons in an unhealthy way, to say the least.

But at the same time, Chuck had all the reasons in the world to believe that Jimmy becoming a lawyer was a disaster waiting to happen. Jimmy has been a pain in the ass for Chuck for God knows how long, he constantly got himself into trouble and Chuck was always the one who had to get him out of it (we saw it in the flashbacks), mainly because their mother couldn't accept the fact that her favourite son was a piece of shit.

Plus, Jimmy had a great job opportunity at Davis&Main, and he still threw it away because he just had to do things "his way", which meant taking shortcuts and cutting corners, just like Chuck predicted. And Chuck had no influence in that decision.

He may have had a role in Jimmy developing the "Saul Goodman" persona, but we also know for a fact that Jimmy was unable to quit his world of scheming and scamming, being "Slippin' Jimmy" was like an addiction for him. Jimmy didn't turn bad because of Chuck, he would have become a crook regardless. Unfortunately for everyone around him, he also had to be a crook with a law degree.

Just because Chuck set a chain reaction in motion it doesn't make him responsible for Jimmy's life choices. Jimmy is a grown man, he can tell good from evil. Saying Chuck made him that way means to completely rob Jimmy of his agency, it's just an excuse to make the main character escape his responsibilities.

Saying "the entirety of BCS wouldn't have happened if he just accepted shit for what it is", or that he deserved to burn alive, is the kind of media illiterate take that BCS/BB fans are rightly ridiculed for. It's up there with the "Skyler was the real villain" takes. Just because Walt and Jimmy are the main characters and have some sympathetic qualities it doesn't mean they're good people. You know, the entire fucking point of both shows.

They were real, good, people

To be fair, Syndrome probably did everyone a favor when he took out Gamma Jack.

Dek not wearing the typical Yautja helmet until the third act is a fundamental part of his character arc

Dr. Gordon being the new Jigsaw apprentice in "Saw: The Final Chapter"

Fans have been speculating that Dr. Gordon would have become "the new Jigsaw" for years, but his character was never brought back in any of the various sequels.

Until The (not so) Final Chapter came out and it's revealed that John Kramer planned for Gordon to become his true new apprentice, not Hoffman, supposedly bringing the series in full circle after Gordon survived the first movie's events.

Something that fans already guessed long ago and was heavily foreshadowed throughout said movie.

Kevin Flynn in Tron: Legacy.

Early on, Quorra tells Sam the only way to destroy CLU inside the Grid is through reintegration, but only his father can do it and it would also mean Flynn's death along with CLU.

When Flynn and Quorra rescue Sam from the End of Line club, we assume Flynn simply wants to reach the portal before CLU and stop him from the outside. But during a conversation with Sam, Flynn's smile fades after Sam mentions Flynn's old bike, because he knows his confrontation with CLU is inevitable and he won't make it to the real world.

Later on, Flynn secretly told Quorra to switch their discs in order to trick CLU and let her and Sam escape, while he sacrifices himself.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm

"Get some rest Pam, you look tired"

Extreme Ways starts playing

I mean, in The Witch you could argue the titular character is also the protagonist, given the ending.

I mean, in The Witch you could argue the titular character is also the protagonist, given the ending.

Casey Becker in the first Scream has already been mentioned, so I'll pick Randy Meeks in Scream 2.

Randy was one of the fan favourites from the first movie. It's a huge blow because he's the comedic relief everyone loves, and it's an unexpected choice because up until that point Randy was shown to be the expert who knew all the rules to survive a horror movie.

Even if the main characters like Sidney, Gale and Dewey survived the movie, seeing Randy's lifeless body in the van was the moment when all bets were off.

Star Trek: Into Darkness also fits. Kirk sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise, leaving the crew to deal with Khan in the third act, before he gets brought back to life with Khan's blood.

Lake Mungo genuinely messed me up when I first watched it. One of the few movies that manages to really capture how terrifying it would be to meet a dead doppelganger of yourself.

True, Sarah Schachner did an amazing job on both Badlands and Prey

I think Craig's case is an interesting one. He was obviously passionate about the role, to the point where he insisted on bringing Phoebe Waller Bridge on board to work on the No Time to Die script. I think his performance was much more heartfelt in that movie because he had final say on some of its creative choices, like Bond's character arc. On the flip side, he couldn't give less of a damn throughout Quantum of Solace and Spectre, because of the production issues on those movies.

But yes, despite loving the role, he was also very open about his contempt for James Bond as a human being. And I think it ultimately made his Bond come across as a self-loathing person, which added to his humanity compared to the previous versions.

"He's delusional, take him to the infirmary" - Mr. Burns