Tech Bros are Hollywood’s newest super villains
And why no toast? Sunday’s Academy Awards won’t be awarding Best Villain, but if it was, Miles Bron would win it in a snap. (With apologies to the cloud of “no”.) He’s an instantly recognizable guy who we’ve become well acquainted with: a visionary (so everyone says), a social media narcissist, a self-proclaimed disruptor who’s talked about a lot “Breaking stuff” is spoken.
Miles Bron is just the latest in a long line of Hollywood’s favorite villains: the tech brother. Looking north to Silicon Valley, the film industry has found perhaps its richest resource of screen antagonists since Soviet times in Russia.
Great movie villains don’t come around very often. Best Picture nominee Top Gun: Maverick, like its predecessor, was content to do battle with a faceless enemy of unspecified nationality. Why piss off international ticket buyers when Tom Cruise vs. Whoever works just fine too?
But in recent years, the tech bro has hit the big screen as Hollywood’s villain. It’s a surge that reflects growing concerns about the increasing pervasiveness of technology in our lives, and increasing skepticism about the not always altruistic motives of the men — and it’s mostly men — who control today’s digital empires.
We had the sneaky CEO of Biosyn Genetics (Campbell Scott) in Jurassic World: Dominion, a franchise dedicated to the threat of technological encroachment; Chris Hemsworth’s biotech overlord in “Spiderhead”; and Mark Rylance’s maybe world-destroying tech guru in 2021’s Don’t Look Up. Superman” from 2016; Harry Melling pharmaceutical entrepreneur in 2020’s The Old Guard; Taika Waititi’s rule-breaking video game mogul in 2021’s Free Guy; search engine CEO to Oscar Isaac in 2014’s “Ex Machina”; and the critical portrayal of the Apple co-founder in 2015’s “Steve Jobs.”
Children’s films, too, regularly channel parental fears about the impact of technology on children. In 2021’s The Mitchells vs. the Machines, a newly introduced AI unleashes a robotic apocalypse. “Ron’s Gone Wrong” (2021) also used a robotic metaphor for smartphone addiction. And television series have just as aggressively rushed to dramatize big-tech mistakes. Recent entries include: Uber’s Travis Kalanick on Showtime’s “Super Pumped”; Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout; and WeWork’s Adam and Rebekah Neumann on Apple TV’s We Crashed.
Some of these portrayals could be attributed to Hollywood’s envy of the emergence of another Californian epicenter of innovation. But these worlds merged long ago. Many of the companies that released these films are disruptors themselves – no more so than Netflix, the distributors of Glass Onion. The streamer was persuaded to release Johnson’s sequel in theaters more often than any previous Netflix release. The film is estimated to have made about $15 million in its opening weekend the old fashioned way, but Netflix execs have said they have no plans to make such theatrical releases a habit.
And the distrust runs deeper than any rivalry between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 70% of Americans believe social media companies do more harm than good. Tech leaders like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have at times been rated positively by just 1 in 5 Americans.
As characters, tech brothers – hoodie-wearing offspring of the mad scientist – have formed an archetype: masters of the universe whose hubris leads to disaster, social media experts unable to manage their personal relationships. Whether their visions of the future work out or not, we live in their world anyway. They are villains who see themselves as heroes.
“To me, he’s really the most dangerous person there is,” Rylance says of his Peter Isherwell. “He believes that we can work our way out of any problem that nature throws at us. I think that’s the same mindset that got us into the problem we’re in now, where we’re trying to dominate each other and dominate all of the lives that we are intimately connected to and dependent on are.”
Nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Glass Onion presents a new escalation in the taunts of tech moguls. Norton’s extremely hard-hitting CEO with a name almost “Bro” is enormously wealthy, powerful and, considering he’s working on a volatile new source of energy, dangerous. But Bron is also, as Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc eventually states, an idiot. “A boastful buffoon,” says Blanc.
In Johnson’s film, the tech brother/emperor brother really doesn’t have any clothes. He just walks by with lies, deceit and a bunch of fake words like “predefined” and “breathe”.
Though Johnson wrote “Glass Onion” long before Elon Musk’s messy Twitter takeover, the film’s release seemed almost preternaturally timed to coincide with it. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX was just one of Johnson’s real-life inspirations, with some claiming Bron was a direct Musk parody. In a widely read Twitter thread, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said Johnson dramatized Musk as “a bad and stupid man,” which he called “an incredibly stupid theory, given that Musk is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in human history.” He added, “How many rockets has Johnson fired lately?”
Musk himself hasn’t commented publicly on “Glass Onion,” but he’s previously had numerous grievances with Hollywood, including his portrayals of guys like him. “Hollywood refuses to write a single story about a real corporate startup where the CEO isn’t an idiot and/or evil,” Musk tweeted last year.
Musk will be getting his own movie soon. Oscar-winning documentary maker Alex Gibney announced Monday his months-long work on Musk, which producers promise will offer a “definitive and unvarnished investigation” of the tech entrepreneur.
At the same time as the tech brother’s supervillain supremacy was emerging, some movies weren’t trying to mock Big Tech, but rather to capture something of the vastness of the digital world. Phil Lord, who produced The Mitchells vs the Machines and the multiverse-divisive Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse with Christopher Miller, says the internet has fundamentally influenced her approach to films.
“We, the old mediums, are responding to new mediums in ways that are perhaps unconscious,” says Lord. “We’re all just trying to figure out how to live in the new world. It changes people’s 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 will also change and reflect that. ‘Into the Spider-Verse’ certainly reflects having a lot of content from all eras in your brain at once.”
Even the most popular movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once, reflects our media-bombed multi-screen lives. Writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, whose film is nominated for 11 leading Oscars, said they wanted to channel the confusion and heartache of living in the do-it-all existence that tech moguls like Miles Bron helped create.
“We made the film because that’s what modern life feels like,” says Kwan.
Even though Miles Bron won’t walk away with an Oscar on Sunday, in a way he still wins. It’s his world. We all just live in it.
