WHEN HOLLYWOOD NEEDS A MOVIE VILLAIN, THE TECH BRO ANSWERS

“A toast to the disruptors,” Edward Norton’s tech billionaire says in Rian Johnson’s Oscar-nominated “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”

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And why not a toast? Sunday’s Academy Awards won’t 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 we’ve 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 Hollywood’s 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 don’t 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 Hollywood’s go-to bad guy. It’s a rise that has mirrored mounting fears over technology’s expanding reach into our lives and increasing skepticism for the not always altruistic motives of the men – and it is mostly men – who control today’s digital empires.