History MotiveDecay / Film

* ''Film/HomeAlone'': The Wet Bandits initially are only interested in burgling houses while their owners are away for Christmas. However, after each of them get caught in a few of Kevin's elaborate booby traps, they quickly stop caring about that in order to get back at him for all their pain and humiliation. This extends to [[Film/HomeAlone2 the sequel]], where they choose to go after Kevin when he interrupts their attempt to burgle the toy store, once again abandoning an attempt to steal a large amount of money in favor of getting revenge on a tween.

* Subverted in ''Franchise/ANightmareOnElmStreet''; after slaughtering the children of the parents of Springwood responsible for killing him, the film franchise changes Freddy Krueger's motives to [[OurSoulsAreDifferent collecting souls]] to increase his powers, occasionally trying to find a way to transfer his powers into the real world, and sometimes just [[AxeCrazy killing for the sake of killing]]. By ''[[Film/FreddysDeadTheFinalNightmare Freddy's Dead]]'' he becomes an OmnicidalManiac, intending to kill the children in every town in the world he can spread to. This actually makes sense, as he was a psychopath in life who delighted in killing children in the first place. It's a perfectly valid take that his {{Revenge}} motive was always nothing more than an excuse.

** Norman Osborn, a.k.a. the Green Goblin, suffered from this in the first ''Film/SpiderMan1'' film. At first he wants to off some jerks who are attempting to sell his company, Oscorp. The thing is, after he successfully kills them all, he inexplicably continues to commit seemingly random villainous acts, and is constantly saying things like "Spider-Man is the only one who can stop me," or "Think of what Spider-Man and I could accomplish if we joined forces!" What, exactly, Spider-Man is stopping him from doing is never made clear. Likely justified, since it's made clear the SuperSerum he [[ProfessorGuineaPig tested out on himself]] turned him insane.

** ''Film/AvengersInfinityWar'': Thanos originally wanted to kill half of his planet at random in a fair attempt to make sure that there were enough resources to go around. What exactly happened is unclear, but his people rejected his plan, and he ended up the last Titan alive. Now he roams the galaxy, conquering planets and then culling half their population in an insane attempt to prove that his people would have survived if they had only listened to him. He claims that his culled worlds, such as Gamora's homeworld, are now paradises, but offers no proof of this; Gamora, in particular, was stated to be the last of her species in a previous movie. He wants to collect all six Infinity Stones so he can do this to the entire universe at once. In ''Film/AvengersEndgame'', [[spoiler:a version of Thanos arrives from 2014 to find a universe where he succeeded in his quest, but everything is terrible and all the heroes are fighting to undo his "great work." He decides that it's their fault for being "ungrateful" and decides to kill the ''entire'' universe, then remake it in his own image so that they won't remember what they lost. This might be an intentional example, to show that his original motive was just an excuse to kill people]].

** Humorously Lampshaded in the sequel series Series/CobraKai when Silver handwaves his behavior as simply the result of a raging cocaine addiction because, hey, it was the 80s.

* ''Franchise/{{Saw}}'': In the first three films, Jigsaw claims that he's a WellIntentionedExtremist who teaches his victims the value of life by putting them in {{Death Trap}}s in which they're forced to perform SelfSurgery or kill others just like them. However, his victims in later films tend to be nothing more than people who ruined his life in some way, with their tests seeming more like outright punishments.