Amplitude death, which occurs in a system when one or more macroscopic wavefunctions collapse to zero, has been observed in mutually coupled solid-state lasers, analog circuits, and thermoacoustic oscillators, to name a few applications. While studies have considered amplitude death on oscillator systems and in externally forced complex Ginzburg-Landau systems, a route to amplitude death has not been studied in autonomous continuum systems. We derive simple analytic conditions for the onset of amplitude death of one macroscopic wavefunction in a system of two coupled complex Ginzburg-Landau equations with general nonlinear self- and cross-interaction terms. Our results give a more general theoretical underpinning for recent amplitude death results reported in the literature, and suggest an approach for tuning parameters in such systems so that they either permit or prohibit amplitude death of a wavefunction (depending on the application). Numerical simulation of the coupled complex Ginzburg-Landau equations, for examples including cubic, cubic-quintic, and saturable nonlinearities, is used to illustrate the analytical results.