Where Have All The (Good) Bad Guys Gone?

There are plenty of things to like about the new Star Trek movie. Sadly, bad guy Krall (Idris Elba) isn’t one of them. Elba himself was awesome as usual (anyone else shattered by the news he considers himself too old to play Bond?), but as bad guys go, Krall barely made a mark. No real character, hardly any screen time, and an evil scheme motivated by revenge — the Times New Roman of evil motivations. To be fair, he’s not alone. These days even the decent bad guys are still pretty forgettable.

Does anyone remember the villain from the last Thor movie? The bad guy from Ant-Man? Both Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice straight-out gave up on real super-villainy and just had the good guys fight amongst themselves. Yes, Star Wars: The Force Awakens had a prominent and memorable bad guy in Kylo Ren, but come on — we all know he’s going to have some kind of redemption halfway through Episode IX.

And what have we got to look forward to? The bad guy in the Jason Bourne movies is always “the system”, so no cool villainy there. Suicide Squad is all bad guys which means they’re going to cancel each other out. Even when trailers promise a decent foe, they often seem to disappoint on screen time in the main feature. Who’s going to be the foe in Wonder Woman — the Kaiser?

No wonder everyone’s excited about Ben Mendelsohn’s mysterious villain in the forthcoming Star Wars: Rogue One. Star Wars is the franchise that gave us Darth Vader; and while Kylo Ren may not be fit to polish Vader’s helmet, we’re all desperately hoping that Arctic Playset Mendo will be a classic villain. But deep down? There’s a lingering feeling he’ll only get three scenes, two of which involve him sneering at and underestimating our heroes, before Vader force-chokes him at the end of the film for his failure.

It’s been eight years since The Dark Knight served up quality villainy in the form of Heath Ledger’s Joker. And before that you wouldn’t even bother pitching an action film without making sure you had a memorable villain. John Malkovich and Gary Oldman made their names stealing scene after scene in action movies; Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber in Die Hard was arguably the best thing about the film. The Terminator? He started out as the bad guy, and it’s been all downhill since.

Here are a few possible explanations why:

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1. We Don’t Have Room For Them

All those old classic tales of good versus evil featured one good guy versus one bad guy (sidekicks and henchmen excepted). These days franchises like The Avengers and The Fast and the Furious feature a platoon of good guys, all of whom soak up valuable villain screen-time. Civil War featured 12 heroes fighting amongst themselves; no wonder the bad guy’s evil scheme largely involved hanging out in his hotel room.

Even traditionally lone wolf heroes now have to have a team backing them up. Deadpool had a couple of X-Men hanging around; Tarzan had Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, a tribe of locals and a rampaging herd of African wildlife. A decade ago, Batman was a brooding loner. Now we’re getting a movie where he spends the whole time assembling his own squad.

It’s no wonder so many villainous schemes involve the villain letting themselves be captured: appearing in scenes with the heroes is the only way they can get more screen time.

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2. Marvel Doesn’t Have Any Decent Villains

Marvel — now owned by Disney — have been dominating superhero movies this decade. One problem: they only have C-list bad guys. That’s because almost all the classic Marvel comic villains belong to characters they licensed out to other studios.

Spider-Man has Doc Ock, The Mole Man, The Green Goblin, and so on. The Fantastic Four has Galactus, Doctor Doom and the Skrulls. The X-Men have Magneto and a whole bunch of evil mutants. None of those bad guys are accessible to Marvel/Disney as things stand. Rumour has it they didn’t even want Spider-Man back from Sony for Spider-Man himself — they wanted access to his roster of super-powered foes.

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3. It All Comes Down To Marketing

Captain America has one of the best bad guy lines-ups in the Marvel/Disney universe — Red Skull, in particular, is about as close to an a-list bad guy as you can get. So why have the last two Captain America movies been built around Cap’s sulky long-haired BFF The Winter Soldier?

Now that all the money is in franchises, all the focus is on the characters you can bring back to build the next film — and use to sell the toys, action figures, lunch boxes that go along with that. That’s why action movies increasingly have huge casts: why focus on just one hero when you can have a whole set for kids to collect?

This doesn’t bode well for a villain, as their main role in the a story is to be defeated at the end of the film; how else do you know the good guys have won? If you bring the same bad guy back in the very next film, the heroes look pretty weak for not having done a better job the first time. Logically then, villains can’t be around as much as heroes, which means from a marketing point of view they’re not as valuable. If the movies are commercials for the characters, why dilute the brand by wasting air time promoting a character who’s not part of your core offering?

The Winter Soldier is a marketable character in a way the Red Skull isn’t. He’s a bad guy who’s not really bad, which means he can spend actual scenes with the heroes the movie is marketing and eventually be redeemed and marketed as a (brooding, dangerous) good guy. (Again, get ready for this surprise plot twist with Kylo Ren a few years down the track).

Bad guys can threaten the planet and murder innocents at will, but stealing screen time from the heroes? That’s the one crime that can’t be allowed.

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Anthony Morris is a freelance journalist who has been writing about films for the last 15 years. He writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Empire magazine, and is the DVD editor of the Big Issue. He can be found on twitter at @morrbeat.