When Hollywood needs a villain, the tech bro answers
“A toast to the disruptors,” Edward Norton's tech billionaire says in Rian Johnson's Oscarnominated “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”
And why not a toast? Sunday's Academy Awards won't give a prize for best villain, but if they did, Miles Bron would win it in a walk. (With apologies to the cloud of “Nope.”) He is an immediately recognizable type we've grown well acquainted with: a visionary (or so everyone says), a social media narcissist, a self-styled disrupter who talks a lot about “breaking stuff.”
Miles Bron is just the latest in a long line of Hollywood's favorite villain: the tech bro. Looking north to Silicon Valley, the movie industry has found perhaps its richest resource of bigscreen antagonists since Soviet-era Russia.
Great movie villains don't come along often. The best-picture nominated “Top Gun: Maverick,” like its predecessor, was content to battle with a faceless enemy of unspecified nationality. Why antagonize international ticket buyers when Tom Cruise vs. Whomever works just fine?
But in recent years, the tech bro has proliferated on movie screens as Hollywood's go-to bad guy. It's a rise that has mirrored mounting fears over technology's expanding reach into our lives and increasing skepticism for the not always altruistic motives of the men – and it is mostly men – who control today's digital empires.
We've had the devious Biosyn Genetics CEO (Campbell Scott) in “Jurassic World: Dominion, a franchise dedicated to the peril of tech overreach; Chris Hemsworth's biotech overlord
in “Spiderhead”; and Mark Rylance's maybeEarth-destroying tech guru in 2021's “Don't Look Up.” We've had Eisenberg, again, as a tech bro-styled Lex Luthor in 2016's “Batman v. Superman”; Harry Melling's pharmaceutical entrepreneur in 2020's “The Old Guard”; Taika Waititi's rulebreaking videogame mogul in 2021's “Free Guy”; Oscar Isaac's search engine CEO in 2014's “Ex Machina”; and the critical portrait of the Apple co-founder in 2015's “Steve Jobs.”
Kids movies, too, regularly channel parental anxieties about technology's impact on children. In 2021's “The Mitchells vs. the Machines,” a newly launched AI brings about a robot apocalypse. “Ron's Gone Wrong” (2021) also used a robot metaphor for smartphone addiction. And TV series have just as aggressively rushed to dramatize Big Tech blunders. Recent entries include: Uber's Travis Kalanick in Showtime's “Super Pumped”; Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu's “The Dropout”; and WeWork's Adam and Rebekah Neumann in Apple TV's “We Crashed.”
Some of these portrayals you could chalk up to Hollywood jealousy over the emergence of another California epicenter of innovation.
But those worlds merged long ago. Many of the companies that released these movies are disrupters, themselves — none more than Netflix, distributor of “Glass Onion.” The streamer was cajoled into releasing Johnson's sequel more widely in theaters than any previous Netflix release. Estimates suggested the film collected some $15 million over opening weekend, the old fashioned way, but Netflix executives have said they don't plan to make a habit of such theatrical rollouts.
And the distrust goes deeper than any Hollywood-Silicon Valley rivalry. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 70% of Americans think social media companies do more harm than good. Tech leaders like Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg have at times been seen favorably by only 1 in 5 Americans.
As characters, tech bros — hoodie-wearing descendants of the mad scientist — have formed an archetype: Masters of the universe whose hubris leads to catastrophe, social media savants who can't manage their personal relationships. Whether their visions of the future pan out or not, we end up living in their world, either way. They're villains who see themselves as heroes.