‘Move fast, break things’: How tech bros became Hollywood villains in 2025 | film

forBetween the meme-led reboot of the US government and the continued push for AI by venture capital-backed blowhards, 2025 seemed like the height of hateful technology, bro. It’s also fitting that jargon-speaking, self-interested digital visionaries have become Hollywood’s favorite villains this year in everything from blockbusters to parodies. Think of the overworked props departments tasked with mocking fake Forbes covers heralding another smiling white man as “Mr. Metaverse” or whatever.

With such saturation in the market, the danger is that all these imaginary men merge into one swamp. It was reasonable to expect Stanley Tucci to sprinkle a little prosciutto on The Electric State, Netflix’s no-expenses-spared alternate-history robot fantasy. As Ethan Skeet — the creator of the “neurocast” technology that crushed an AI uprising and then turned the general public into lukewarm virtual reality addicts — Tucci certainly looked the part: bald and imperious in the wardrobe of an old Bond villain. But even the great cocktail maker couldn’t extract much from sour existential statements like: “Our world is a tire of fire floating on an ocean of urine.”

There was more baldness in Superman, with Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor embodying the worst kind of paradigm shifter: someone desperate to get on talk shows. Angry that the world seemed to be ignoring his genius in favor of an alien benefactor, the LuthorCorp founder spent a fortune gouging social media, deploying an army of cyborg slasher apes to flood the platforms with anti-Superman hashtags and memes. That the film itself was met with such outrage over perceived vigilantism added an unsettling hall-of-mirrors feel to what was essentially an audience pleaser. Hoult’s Lex was also an interestingly hot tech CEO, pushing the film further into the realm of fantasy.

Is it more attractive when these selfish idiots are funny? In the M3gan 2.0 killer-puppet action thriller, Jemaine Clement was sleazy overconfident as Alton Appleton, the high-flying billionaire whose latest whiz is pushing an unwanted neural implant onto the masses. Seduced by a catatonic fembot assassin, Alton is humiliated in his final moments, his signature Altwave technology is effortlessly hacked, and his bizarre six-pack of artificial muscles disintegrates. It was pathetic but humane. As the movie goes on, she actually starts to miss him.

If Clement had managed to forget about technology, Danny Huston had to remain impassive in the face of Frank Drebin Jr.’s chatty Liam Neeson in the reboot of The Naked Gun. Houston’s Richard Cain was a hybrid of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who used galactic profits from his online retail and electric car empires to create a “primitive law of durability” device. His master plan was to return the common people to a prehistoric mindset, violently cull the herd and usher in a new era for humanity (or at least for the billionaire class). Kane was obsessed with men’s sperm counts, and built luxury bunkers for the wealthy and the Black Eyed Peas. In other words: truly psychotic.

In the brooding world of The Toxic Avenger reboot, Bob Garbinger, the floppy-haired biotech villain played by Kevin Bacon, stood out simply because he looked so pale and spoiled. Although it’s not a great sign when a self-proclaimed “health style” expert confuses Sisyphus with syphilis, Garbinger’s habit of not wearing a shirt while pitching “cutting-edge proprietary probiotics” in TV commercials seemed like a timely diversion for immortality-seeking biohackers like Brian Johnson.

In 2022, Evan Peters stars in Netflix’s scary movie Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Did this influence his casting as a second-generation Nebo kid in Tron: Ares? To be fair, Julian Dillinger – the grandson of David Warner’s boardroom bully from the original 1982 Tron film – seemed more neurotic than psychotic: the baby-faced tech salesman with nasty circuit board sleeve tattoos, whose bold move into evil 3D-printed neon war machines and digital special forces was only hampered by the fact that they exploded within 30 minutes. An expensive, resource-intensive, and basically useless product? Intentionally or not, it seemed like an apt metaphor for the AI ​​bubble.

But why do we stop at just one technology, brother? Jesse Armstrong’s satirical film Mountainhead takes the bold step of making every character the worst of the billionaire’s “move fast, break things” mentality, isolating them — and the viewer — in a remote, haunting luxury ski lodge while the specter of potential Armageddon encroaches. As the owner of a social media app that spreads dangerous AI-powered misinformation, like Musk, Corey Michael Smith captured the casual, amoral tone of a richer-than-God person who views the world as their plaything.

While Vince (Smith), silver investor Randall (Steve Carell), savvy algorithm tamer Jeff (Rami Youssef), and would-be wellness app head Supremo (Jason Schwartzman) relentlessly sew each other up, there’s an illicit thrill to contact the combative quartet within the baseball squad of bragging, toasting, and toasting. But as the world spiraled into further chaos, watching these four thought leaders clumsily debate how best to exploit the situation was frustrating, not least because it seemed so plausible. We’ve all been forced to internalize the pathologies of our technology overlords because of their disproportionate influence in the real world. With a new cinematic year approaching, is it too much to ask that we don’t have to keep doing it at the cinema as well?