And why not a toast? Sundays Academy Awards wont 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 weve 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 Hollywoods favorite villain: the tech bro. Looking north to Silicon Valley, the movie industry has found perhaps its richest resource of big-screen antagonists since Soviet-era Russia.
Great movie villains dont 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 Hollywoods go-to bad guy. Its a rise that has mirrored mounting fears over technologys expanding reach into our lives and increasing skepticism for the not always altruistic motives of the men and it is mostly men who control todays digital empires.
Weve had the devious Biosyn Genetics CEO (Campbell Scott) in Jurassic World: Dominion, a franchise dedicated to the peril of tech overreach; Chris Hemsworths biotech overlord in Spiderhead; and Mark Rylances maybe-Earth-destroying tech guru in 2021s Dont Look Up. Weve had Eisenberg, again, as a tech bro-styled Lex Luthor in 2016s Batman v. Superman; Harry Mellings pharmaceutical entrepreneur in 2020s The Old Guard; Taika Waititis rule-breaking videogame mogul in 2021s Free Guy; Oscar Isaacs search engine CEO in 2014s Ex Machina; and the critical portrait of the Apple co-founder in 2015s Steve Jobs.
Kids movies, too, regularly channel parental anxieties about technologys impact on children. In 2021s The Mitchells vs. the Machines, a newly launched AI brings about a robot apocalypse. Rons 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: Ubers Travis Kalanick in Showtimes Super Pumped; Theranos Elizabeth Holmes in Hulus The Dropout; and WeWorks Adam and Rebekah Neumann in Apple TVs 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 Johnsons 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 dont 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 cant manage their personal relationships. Whether their visions of the future pan out or not, we end up living in their world, either way. Theyre villains who see themselves as heroes.
In my mind, hes really the most dangerous human being around, Rylance says of his Peter Isherwell. He believes that we can dominate our way out of any problem that nature hands us. I think thats the same kind of thinking thats got us into the problem were in now, trying to dominate each other and dominate all the life were intimately connected to and dependent on.
Glass Onion, nominated for best original screenplay, presents a new escalation in tech mogul mockery. Nortons eminently punchable CEO, with a name so nearly Bro, is enormously rich, powerful and, considering that hes working on a volatile new energy source, dangerous. But Bron is also, as Daniel Craigs Benoit Blanc eventually deduces, an idiot. A vainglorious buffoon, Blanc says.
In Johnsons film, the tech bro/emperor bro truly has no clothes. Hes just skating by with lies, deceit and a bunch of not-real words like predefinite and inbreathiate.
Even though Johnson wrote Glass Onion well before Elon Musks shambolic Twitter takeover, the movies release seemed almost preternaturally timed to coincide with it. The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive was only one of Johnsons real-world inspirations, some took Bron as a direct Musk parody. In a widely read Twitter thread, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said Johnson was dramatizing Musk as a bad and stupid man, which he called an incredibly stupid theory, since Musk is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in human history. He added: How many rockets has Johnson launched lately?
Musk, himself, hasnt publicly commented on Glass Onion, but he has previously had numerous gripes with Hollywood, including its depictions of guys like him. Hollywood refuses to write even one story about an actual company startup where the CEO isnt a dweeb and/or evil, Musk tweeted last year.
Musk will soon enough get his own movie. The Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney on Monday announced his several months into work on Musk, which producers promise will offer a definitive and unvarnished examination of the tech entrepreneur.
At the same time as the tech bros supervillainy supremacy has emerged, some movies have sought not to lampoon Big Tech but to imbibe some of the digital worlds infinite expanse. Phil Lord, who with Christopher Miller has produced The Mitchells vs the Machines and the multiverse-splitting Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, says the internet has profoundly influenced their approach to film.
We, legacy media, are responding in maybe subconscious ways to new media, says Lord. Were all just trying to figure out how to live in the new world. Its changing peoples behavior. It changes the way we find and experience love. It changes the way we live. Of course, the stories we tell and how we tell them are going to change as well and reflect that. Into the Spider-Verse certainly reflects having a lot of content from every era in your brain all at the same time.
The best-picture favorite Everything Everywhere All at Once, too, is reflective of our multi-screen, media-bombarded lives. Writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, whose film is up for a leading 11 Oscars, say they wanted to channel the confusion and heartache of living in the everything-everywhere existence that tech moguls like Miles Bron helped create.
The reason why we made the movie is because thats what modern life feels like, says Kwan.
So even though Miles Bron wont go home with an Academy Award on Sunday, he still wins, in a way. Its his world. Were all just living in it.
