30 Years of Movie Villains, Visualized 9 Different Ways

Charts, charts, and more charts about cinematic Bad Guys/Gals.

One of a story’s most important characters is the Nemesis… the Antagonist… the Villain. Why?

• They provide opposition to the Protagonist which makes the Protagonist’s physical and psychological journey more meaningful.
• Often they represent that which the Protagonist fears the most making their connection that much more dramatic.
• They provide a great role over which actors salivate, therefore elevating your scripted project’s value to buyers.

Plus this: The bottom line of a Villain / Nemesis / Antagonist is to provide opposition to the Protagonist, thereby creating a visceral, visual, and centralized conflict to the narrative.

Antagonists are important characters. Indeed that’s why I created a one-week online course: Write a Worthy Nemesis.

Vulture recently ran a post: 30 Years of Movie Villains. In it, they feature 9 infographics about 300+ movies released in the last three decades looking at things like age, race, gender, occupation, motivation, and so on. For some reason, I can’t insert the graphs in a blog post, so you’ll have to go to the Vulture article to see them, however let me provide a numeric breakdown of two specific categories with analysis:

Motivation for Villainy

Some things never change. Over the last 30 years, action movies have primarily drawn their villains as vengeful adversaries with an eye toward world domination. In the superhero era, this characterization is only becoming more common.

Breakdown by sub-category and percentage:

Domination: 28.3%
Greed: 21.2%
Revenge: 20.3%
Cover-Up: 12.2%
Eradication: 7.3%
Ransom: 4.4%
Survival: 3.7%
Anarchy: 2.2%

There’s even Cannibalism (0.3%): Kevin, the serial killer villain in Sin City (2005), who kills and eats his victims.

Analysis: No wonder the whole “I’m taking over the world / galaxy / universe” angle feels played out! Over a quarter of the cinematic stories featuring villains, something around 80–90 movies, feature this as the character’s motivation.

Frankly I never really understood this dynamic anyhow, at least logically. Let’s say you’re the villain. You take over the world! You’re the ruler of everyone! Now what? Take daily delight in screwing with your citizens? But doesn’t whatever enjoyment you get out of that wear off over time? Combine that with bureaucratic responsibilities and a constant fear someone else is going to try to take you out, apart from the personal satisfaction you may gain by attaining your goal (POWER!!!), what’s the point?

Similarly revenge. After you whack whoever aggrieved you, then what? Your purpose for living is gone once you achieve your goal, a vacuum created in your psyche. How will you fill that?

Of the three top motivations, greed is the most logical. As the Bible says, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” We see this in evidence nowadays, the gluttony for wealth seeming to have created a plague among the gilded class. More tax cuts for the 1% crowd! When will enough wealth be enough? Perhaps never. Which is why greed as a motivation may resonate most of all.

Two caveats:

• Movies about domination almost never explain why that is the villain’s motivation, so questioning the logic of the dynamic is almost beside the point, I would think, for hardcore fans of these type of movies.
• If the villain is a psychopath, logic is likely not the primary consideration in their decision-making process as to goals.

Indeed the Vulture article provides another graph relevant to this discussion:

Why do villains want to dominate the world?

Here’s a backstory breakdown of those who were motivated by world domination, the most common motivator of all the villains surveyed.

Breakdown by sub-category and percentage:

Radicalized: 29.8%
Criminal: 19.1%
Corrupted: 18.1%
Directed to Eliminate: 12.8%
Chemically Altered: 8.5%
Disadvantaged Background: 8.5%
Sociopath: 3.2%

Apart from curiosity about what the difference is between “radicalized” and “corrupted”, frankly if I were to write a movie in which my Nemesis had a goal to take over the world, I’d probably work the “directed to eliminate” and “chemically altered” angle. It worked plenty well in The Terminator (1984): “A seemingly indestructible humanoid cyborg is sent from 2029 to 1984 to assassinate a waitress.” The whole prime directive thing. That’s clean, don’t need to worry about logic or anything else to explain the villain’s motivation: They are simply hard-wired with their goal.

Still if you’re writing an original story featuring a villain, you may want to think twice before defaulting immediately to domination as your character’s primary motivation. It’s kinda boring now, don’t you think?

One final takeaway: When developing your story’s characters, it’s always a good idea to spend time working with your Nemesis from the perspective that THEY are the story’s protagonist. They aren’t, of course (unless they are), but to their way of looking at things, that’s how they experience everything that happens: They are the protagonist of their own story.

Benefits of these type of character exercises are manifold perhaps most important: You will find the ‘humanity’ within the character. Nemeses who demonstrate identifiable human characteristics to which the script reader and audience member can relate make for much more compelling, multidimensional individuals.

For the rest of the Vulture article where you can see all the pretty villainous graphs, go here.