In a year dominated by headlines about AI hype and Silicon Valley excess, Hollywood has found its perfect contemporary antagonist: the tech bro billionaire. Throughout 2025, a slew of major films, from superhero blockbusters to sharp satires, have swapped out traditional villains for jargon-spouting, self-important digital visionaries, holding a dark mirror up to our real-world tech overlords.
The New Face of Cinematic Evil
The trend saw a diverse range of actors embodying this modern archetype. In Netflix's lavish alt-history epic The Electric State, Stanley Tucci played Ethan Skate, the bald and imperious creator of 'neurocaster' technology. His invention saved humanity from an AI uprising, only to enslave it in listless virtual reality, a fate he describes with sour grandeur. Meanwhile, the Lex Luthor of 2025's Superman was reimagined as a petulant, media-hungry CEO, played by Nicholas Hoult. This Luthor's villainy involved rigging social media with an army of cyborg monkeys to smear the Man of Steel, a plot that felt uncomfortably close to modern influence campaigns.
The parody was even broader in the reboot of The Naked Gun, where Danny Huston portrayed Richard Cane, a clear hybrid of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. His deranged plan involved using a 'Primordial Law of Toughness' device to revert humanity to a prehistoric state, all while obsessing over sperm counts and luxury bunkers. In the grimy world of The Toxic Avenger reboot, Kevin Bacon stood out as a pale, pampered biotech guru, his shirtless ads for 'bio-boosters' offering a direct satire of real-life immortality-seeking biohackers.
Satire, Spoofs, and the AI Bubble
Other films explored different facets of tech bro toxicity. M3gan 2.0 featured Jemaine Clement as a sleazily overconfident billionaire pushing neural implants, his humiliation providing a rare, humanising moment. Tron: Ares presented a more neurotic version in Evan Peters' Julian Dillinger, a nepo-baby tech huckster whose 3D-printed war machines implode within minutes—a pointed metaphor for the potentially hollow AI bubble.
However, the most concentrated critique came from Jesse Armstrong's jagged satire Mountainhead. The film isolated a group of the worst 'move fast, break stuff' billionaires—including Steve Carell as a silverback investor and Ramy Youssef as an algorithm tamer—in a remote ski lodge. As they cynically workshop how to exploit global chaos, the film delivers the illicit thrill and profound depression of eavesdropping on the world's most influential, and irresponsible, minds.
A Reflection of Real-World Anxieties
This cinematic shift is no accident. It reflects a public grappling with the disproportionate influence of a handful of tech titans on society, politics, and the economy. The pathologies of these characters—their glib morality, obsession with disruption, and delusions of grandeur—are amplified versions of traits witnessed in headlines daily. As one film after another asks audiences to boo these figures, it raises a poignant question: with their real-world counterparts shaping so much of modern life, is the cinema becoming one of the few places where we can safely see them taken down a peg?
