Not too lengthy in the past, film villains have been simply recognized by their facial scarring, malevolent laughs, and weirdly high collars—however lately, the shorthand has shifted considerably. Turtlenecks and hoodies are the hallmarks of at present’s sinister supervillains, because the billionaire tech bro has more and more develop into the antagonist of alternative. 

Take Rian Johnson’s Oscar-nominated Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which facilities across the murderous gray T-shirted CEO, Miles Bron (Edward Norton). Bron is ready to launch an alternate (and harmful) hydrogen-based gasoline earlier than he’s not-so-gradually revealed to be an fool. Audiences have compared him to billionaire boy of the second, Elon Musk. 

But that’s the apparent one. The extra nefarious of those supervillains conceal in plain sight. Take The Santa Clauses, the serialized sequel to The Santa Clause movie sequence that debuted in 1994. Premiering on Disney+ final November, the present begins with Santa (Tim Allen) retiring and in search of a alternative. He chooses tech developer and Jeff Bezos-wannabe Simon Choksi (Kal Penn). Surprise, shock, drone-based deliveries are in the end not the that means of Christmas, and the be-hoodied Simon seems to be the unhealthy type of disruptive earlier than his daughter places him proper. 

A decade after Facebook origin story The Social Network debuted in 2010, wealthy tech CEOs have more and more recurred as unhealthy guys—or a minimum of antiheroes. In 2018, Upgrade featured AI-chip inventor Eron Keen (sure, actually). In 2021, Don’t Look Up had the turtlenecked cellphone developer Peter Isherwell and Free Guy had egotistical gaming CEO Antwan Hovachelik. The development has even trickled down into youngsters’s leisure: Before The Santa Clauses, 2021 animated movie Ron’s Gone Wrong featured tech govt Andrew Morris, a villain intent on “data-harvesting” (he truly says these phrases on display). 

The mad scientist has developed into the mad disruptor, however why is that this occurring, and why now? To a point, film villains have at all times mirrored societal anxieties—the mad scientist trope first emerged, says University of Warwick movie fellow James Taylor, due to fears across the atomic bomb. But Taylor additionally notes that villains don’t simply replicate our fears, “they also feed into these anxieties, helping to shape and spread them.” 

Superman antagonist Lex Luthor is the proper instance of this evolving villainy. “The character was initially a mad scientist, then in the 1980s became a CEO, and in the recent screen incarnation Jesse Eisenberg brought in qualities of the tech bro,” Taylor says. “We can easily relate this to changing cultural concerns.” After all, we not affiliate scientists with “new technologies for annihilating humanity.” Instead, “in the current climate crisis, scientists are frequently presented as noble figures struggling in vain to make callous CEOs and politicians recognize and reverse harm being done to the planet.” 

Meanwhile, you solely should open a newspaper to see tech honchos gone unhealthy. Elon Musk’s vehicles are crashing, former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes faces 11 years in prison for defrauding buyers, whereas WeWork founder Adam Neumann stands accused of being pregnant discrimination. No surprise these realities are more and more represented in fiction.