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Villians?

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Dissy:
With Sony and Fox announcing that their new respective movies Venom and Magneto will begin shooting as early as next year, and with all the hype surrounding WB movie roles of Ledger's Joker, and HP's Young Tom Riddle, is this the beginning of a new trend?  Movies to now focus on the villians?

url=http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/08/03/sunday-discussion-the-villains-reign-supreme-in-hollywood/]This guy seems to think so.[/url]  He also thinks that No Country For Old Men started this theme.

I am not a movie buff, but I do agree with him.  Villians in advertising have taken a central role.  Spidey 3, we were teased wih images of Venom.  TDK's viral campaign was pretty much soley based off of the Joker's character.  Transformers, we had Megatron, and the other Decepticons.

I have seen probably a couple hundred movies in my life thus far.  I do know that No Country did not start this villian theme.  The first movie that I recall really focussing on the villian was a little known 1989 movie called Batman.  Who got the top billing in the movie?  Jack Nicholson got top billing.  He also got the most screentime, he had the most dialogue.  In the 90s, there were few movies that focused on the antagonists.

What are your thoughts on this subject?

Dimmukane:
With everyone else scrambling for villain roles, maybe Gary Oldman can finally be the hero?

The thing with the Joker/Venom/Chigurh trend isn't that they got the most screentime or top billing, it's that the directors are trying to emphasize that the villains play a role that's as important as the hero's.  In fact, I don't think any of them got top billing or the most screentime in the movie.  Chigurh was the first villain in recent films to get an Oscar, but he's by no means the first, and pretty much everyone involved in that movie gave a damn good performance. 

The reason for Venom and Magneto?  Both have been in a lot of comics and have cool superpowers with which to create special effects for.  As for Young Tom Riddle, it's merely timing that it's happening now.  In the 7th book, he gets much less screentime; it's focused on the journey of Harry, Ron and Hermione, and some of Dumbledore's backstory/general wizarding history.  You could say he's barely going to be featured until somewhere in the second movie when it picks up.

To me there doesn't seem to be much of an upswing in villainy, it's just timing of movie releases.  I don't even know when the Venom and Magneto movies are coming out, anyway, the whole thing will probably have died down by then.

KvP:
If it's the sort of story to have a villain, that story is only as good as its villain. I'd say this is more true in video games than in movies, but I'm more familiar with them, so.

Wayfaring Stranger:
I'm pretty sure it's equally true in anything with a story involving a hero.  Who's going to consider him or her a hero if they don't have something truly formidable to overcome?

Faker:
In a similar theme to having the villain of the piece as the central character  Ridley Scott has a film in production (actually postponed at the moment) called Nottingham, it's basically the Robin Hood story from the point of view of the Sheriff of Nottingham.

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