Supervillain movies: Can the bad guy win?

I was just watching the IGN Superhero show which talks about the planned 'Sinister six' movie. The movie would be fully dedicated to six (any of the best) Spiderman villains. It has been done in comic form before but this would be its first entry into big picture cinema. However it got me thinking about whether an audience would bother adopting this film widely.

Superhero films are typically about how good can triumph over evil no matter how bad it is. To my knowledge (feel free to prove me wrong) they were created around the time of the Great Depression and WW2 as a means of propaganda to incite patriotism across the masses and to make people more positive about the future. You only need to see Superheroes such as Captain America and Superman to see that they are meant to epitomize all that is good in humans as they fight evil and save the innocent. People loved Superheroes because they always saved the day and always had a happy ending. Evil loses and the good guys win.

Therefore in a movie solely about villains, and i'm assuming successful villains, would the audience still enjoy it in the same way? It is well known that the villain is often more popular in some movies than the hero (Heath Ledger's Joker, Loki) but in these instance the villain still loses and the hero saves the day. The villain may be a popular character but in the end I don't think that audiences would be Ok with evil triumphing. That is not why people watch Superhero movies.

There is probably a niche market that a director could attempt to occupy with a flipped movie such as this. There are quite a lot of moviegoers who have slightly sadistic tastes and would be highly interested in a 'bad guy' movie. However it would be hard for such a movie to penetrate the greater audience and therefore would have to be fairly low budget if it hoped to make any turnover. This is because kids make up the main portion of superhero movie attendants (Kick-ass being a notable exception). Most kids don't want to see an avant-garde piece of film they want to see the typical good vs evil and for the good guy to smash the villain into oblivion.

As a slightly older participant I'm not sure if this sort of movie would really appeal to me. I would be interested in seeing it to see how it goes but I don't feel that I could empathise in any way with the villains and be emotionally attached to their story. Especially if they are murdering innocents and blowing up cities. Furthermore a movie in this vain would probably have to have a high rating such as R18+ (in Australia) and would further limit its chances of success commercially.

What do you guys think? Could it be successful? what type of movie would it have to be for people to get involved with it?

Can the bad guy ever win?

Cheers,

Lachie

One of the problems that movies have going against them is budgets. Particularly super-powered sci-fi/fantasy movies. Those things tend to be fairly expensive, which necessitates a wide appeal. This is precisely the reason why most R-rated movies are fairly low budget; the really expensive movies are almost always PG-13 or lower.

Now, in comics it's possible toi get away with an evil protagonist because comics don't require the same budgets. A small team of talented individuals can independently publish a comic with niche appeal. That's harder to get away with in superhero movies. Different standards and whatnot. People can look at a great comic and ignore the low production values such as inferior paper quality, but superhero movies are held to a higher standard. If you're trying to show people doing spectacular things on film, then audiences are far less forgiving if it looks like shit. Either pony up the money for good production values, or do something like Clerks where production values aren't that important.

Furthermore, it's hard to construct a story that's about the protagonists just being assholes, unless the point is to show that their behavior is wrong. Why? Because generally speaking, the actions of the protagonists generally reflect the values of the audiences, and audiences generally just don't like to think of themselves as assholes. Some supervillain might want to kill everyone, but how do you make a story around that? Sure, audiences might like Darth Vader or Hannibal Lecter, but the point to take from this is that Lecter (despite being evil) still helped stop other killers. Dexter is a bad guy, but he only kills other bad guys. Walter White is an asshole, but the entire series has him triumphing over other assholes. Even if you make the bad guys the protagonists, you still sort of have to make them the good guys BY COMPARISON (the exception being when the point of the story is to specifically demonstrate how wrong their behavior is). Even when they do bad things, they can't be THAT bad. Like, you can have a protagonist flatout murder a guy, but it has to be someone who was already kind of an asshole anyway. You can't, for example, have the protagonist walk up to an innocent baby and blow her head off with a shotgun. Do that and the audience sees the protagonist as a monster. And then you've lost the audience. They still need to have some connection, some way of placing themselves in the protagonist's shoes. And you lose that connection if the charachter acts TOO evil. This is why most of the stories with bad guys as protagonists has those guys acting as antiheroes rather than VILLAINS. An antihero might do horrible things, but he does them for a good cause, he's still working towards some goal that we can relate to. So they're still sort of the good guys BY COMPARISON. Whereas VILLAINS are just plain evil. You can have the villain win, but you can't have the story follow the villain (or at least it's really freaking hard to do so). The character traits of protagonists illustrate something that the audience wants to see in themselves. That's why we care about their story. The second that you go off the rails and make them truly obviously unrepentantly evil, you've made the audience say, "I want nothing to do with that guy, unless I'm seeing someone step up and kick his ass." That means limited appeal to audiences, which is also why that kind of stuff tends to not happen in movies.

The Killing Joke, one of the most well-recognized and celebrated Batman one-offs had Joker attack and nearly kill a major character in the Batman family. The badguys don't "win" per se, but they get their shots in all the time.

Might as well use A Death in the Family were the Joker actually kills a major character: Robin, Jason Todd.

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The harder the concept, the greater the challenge. Lets get PTA or Nolan on the phone.

I wouldn't mind watching a movie where "the supervillain wins" if they could come up with a good reason why the villain does what he/she does. The problem is, most villains do it "because they're evil" or "because they want power" and that's just a very non-interesting excuse to present a hero (to stop the bad guy with a stupid goal).

What the heroes have going for themselves is that people relate more easily to "good guys" and I'm no exception, but I find that I don't always need to relate to a character if I understand their motivation. That being said, a good villain has to be 10 times as well-written as a hero to be half as well liked by the masses due to what I mentioned before and that's just too much work for most creative minds =P When I write, heroes come semi-easily for me, even though I don't like making them (using a D&D alignment =P) completely Lawful Good, but more Neutral Good or True Neutral, but whenever I'm writing a book with a villain as a main character I have to say I sweat trying to figure out a way to make him likable yet unrelatable but I definitely think it is possible. Whether it's Hollywood-marketable though, I have no clue.