villain era
11 titles
Films about someone who decides, on purpose, to stop being the good one. Some of them get pushed there. The rest never needed a push.
Some of them get talked into it. Estella spends years building a life on the London streets before the Baroness's cruelty finally tips her into the raucous, revenge-bent Cruella in Cruella. Elphaba spends Wicked fighting the Wizard's injustices, and it's that fight that eventually gets her labelled "wicked."
Some of them never needed a reason. Velma and Roxie are both already killers by the time Chicago opens, and spend the rest of the film fighting to turn a murder trial into stardom. The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont turn seduction into a competitive sport in Dangerous Liaisons, with a night with Merteuil as Valmont's prize for every conquest he can prove in writing. Patrick Bateman keeps a routinized morning beauty regimen and a bottomless need to be the best in American Psycho, whatever it costs the people standing near him.
By the end, nobody here is pretending it was self-defense.
