Corrupt Corporate Executive / Live-Action Films

Corrupt Corporate Executives in live-action films.

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• The Big Bad of The Accountant (2016), Lamar Blackburn, is revealed to be performing an Enron-style swindle to boost his company's stock price for when it becomes public and is willing to hire mercenaries to murder anybody who has knowledge of this crime, including the other two higher-ups in the company, who happen to be his best friend and his sister. He tries to justify it as making sure the company is well-financed enough to keep developing technology and help people, but he just comes off as a self-important jerk (again, he orders the assassination of his own sister because she knows too much).
• Alien:
  • Aliens: Though not a CEO, Carter Burke is the only member of The Squad who answers directly to the MegaCorp that owns the infested colony and constantly endangers everyone by putting his own agenda (capturing and weaponizing the eponymous aliens for profit) ahead of everyone else.
  • Prometheus: Peter Weyland makes clear that he will do anything to become great (as in "godlike"), or die trying... and when he's actually dying, he funds an expedition to a planet where Precursors supposedly lived in the hopes of finding a way to extend his life, without caring about the possibility of everybody else in the expedition dying in horrible ways. This shouldn't be too shocking, given that his last name is half of the MegaCorp's (Weyland-Yutani).
• Alvin and the Chipmunks: In the beginning of the first film, Ian Hawke discourages Dave from furthering his music career — once the Chipmunks get famous, he proceeds to spoil them, distance them from Dave, and tire them out from constant tours. It isn't until the Chipmunks see Dave infiltrating one of their concerts that they realize Ian's a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing. In the sequel, he is jobless, but plans to get his revenge by adopting the Chipettes and putting their Battle of the Bands audition on the Internet. They end up getting the opportunity to open for Britney Spears, and Ian puts it in top priority over the actual Battle of the Bands concert, threatening to barbecue them if they don't comply.
• Amazing Grace and Chuck: Mr. Jeffries is essentially a stand-in for the more nebulous concept of the military-industrial complex as a whole: rich, powerful, ruthless, and not happy that some "wild cards" are messing with the system that he derives his wealth and influence from.
• Antitrust: Gary Winston tries to justify his actions (which include stealing others' work and outright murder) by claiming that any startup company in a garage can put his software giant NURV out of business.
• Assault on Wall Street: Jeremy Stancroft is a Wall Street banker who runs a toxic fund which ruins untold numbers of investors when it collapses. Even when faced with death, he's entirely unrepentant.
• Astro (2018): Alexander Biggs, who offers Jack a chance to come with him into space. When Jack turns down the offer, Biggs decides to bring him by force.
• Parker Selfridge in Avatar. The man has nothing but utter contempt for the Na'Vi as an obstacle to mine Unobtanium and the only reason he is not in line with Colonel Quaritch's plans to blow them all up and let God sort 'em out (aside from a very feeble example of standards) is because he doesn't wants to deal with the bad PR.
• Everyone at the Unexploited Land Development Corporation in The Bad Sleep Well is this, especially the high-level executives like Iwabuchi who are willing to order people's deaths to maintain their position and stay out of prison.
• Batman Returns has the aptly named Max Shreck, who also dresses and looks like a vampire — fittingly enough, since he secretly drains the city of its energy. Not so fittingly, he puts a convincing act as a benefactor to Gotham, even while whoever is too close to him mysteriously disappears (like his wife, his business partner Fred Atkins, and his secretary Selina Kyle).
• When you take out the assassination attempts and trophy-husbanding, Mr. Grover in The Big Store is also prone to book cooking.
• Eric from Billy Madison blackmails Billy's principal into failing him so he can take control of the company. At the academic decathlon, he bombs a question on business ethics.
• Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed: The Kowalskis are described to be this after gaining ownership of Bob Ross' name and likeness. They forced all of Bob's fellow painters off the air, trained people to paint like Bob Ross so they could sell all their paintings as Bob Ross originals, and don't let Bob's family get any of the profits.
• Boiler Room: All of the J.T. Marlin brokers are Con Men. They're running a "pump-and-dump" stock scam (where the share prices of phony companies are inflated through false statements), but project themselves as honest businessmen to outsiders. Even the protagonist is unaware the company he's working for is a scam until he begins to check on its records.
• The Burning Sea: Subverted: Submarine operator Sofia shows her boss William Lie (yes, really) video of something disturbing happening on the sea bed, and he takes the hard drive and reminds her that she signed a non-disclosure agreement. A few minutes later we see him ordering a shut-down of the entire Norwegian oil drilling industry.
• In The Chain Reaction, the head of the Western Atomic Long-term Dumping Organization, or WALDO, is only interested in protecting himself and believes that an accident at one of their facilities should be covered up despite the potential radioactive contamination putting thousands of lives at stake and will stop at nothing to silence the protagonists.
• In Champagne for Caesar, evil and possibly insane soap company CEO Burnbridge "Dirty" Waters (Vincent Price) attempts to sabotage the genius who is using his own game show to bankrupt the company. When the genius gets a cold, he sends a beautiful woman pretending to be a nurse in order to fog his mighty brain. Of course, the genius figures it out and uses it against him. At one point, his secretary asks Waters why he just doesn't throw the genius off the show. Waters takes her hands and gently explains his thinking. "You see, my dear, if we throw his off the show our viewers won't like it. If they don't like it, they won't watch the show. If they don't watch the show, they won't buy our soap. If they don't buy our soap, our sales will drop to nothing AND WE'LL LOSE MONEY!"
• Noah Cross from Chinatown is one of the greatest examples in cinema. A cunning, ruthless, and perverse sociopath, Cross is already the richest and most powerful man in Los Angeles, but he plans to enrich himself even more via rendering vast farmlands arid by illegally dumping their irrigation water into the ocean, thus causing their prices to plummet to next to nothing. After forcing the farmers to sell their land to his cabal of corrupt business partners, Cross intends to develop his newly acquired land by irrigating it with the water supply diverted from the city itself, through a new aqueduct and reservoir built from $8 million of taxpayer money. His only gain from this elaborate swindle is "The future!" What's worse, this doesn't even include his more... shocking crimes, which include raping his daughter, Evelyn Murray.
• Travis from Congo is so obsessed with making money that he sends out multiple expeditions into the dangerous African jungle to search for diamonds that will make his company billions of dollars. When the members of the expeditions keep dying off, he doesn't care. He just sends more people out in the hopes that at least one of them will retrieve the diamonds. Then there's the fact that one of those people is his own son. No, he doesn't care.
• One of the earliest cinematic examples comes from A Corner in Wheat, in which a Corrupt Corporate Executive monopolizes the wheat market and then jacks up prices, victimizing both the poor farmer trying to sell his wheat crop and the urban poor who can't afford to buy bread.
• The Dark Knight Trilogy:
  • Wayne Enterprises CEO William Earle in Batman Begins. Rapacious, cold, ruthless, swapping out philanthropy for weapons sales — definitely not true to Thomas Wayne's legacy. While he doesn't have any explicit ties to the microwave emitter project, it's implied that he's trying to keep the company's ownership of it under wraps because (as Lucius notes) it's an illegal and highly unethical weapon. When Lucius questions Earle about it, Earle fires him, presumably to try to shut him up and keep him from stumbling onto any more dirty secrets in Applied Sciences.
  • Wayne Enterprises board member John Daggett in The Dark Knight Rises. Bane and his men attack the Stock Exchange on Daggett's orders to acquire resources and snuff out Wayne Enterprises. The result is that at least seven people who had nothing to do with Daggett get seriously injured or killed (the four guards that Bane brutally overpowers as he enters, and at least three people get shot during the takeover).
• Bromley from Daybreakers is every bit of this. Even after a synthetic blood substitute is developed, he still won't release the captive humans from the blood farms. Why? Because rich vampires will pay top dollar for the real thing.
• Judah Clark from Dead in Tombstone is the mine owner who happily cuts a deal with Red and the Blackwater Gang to keep the money flowing into his coffers.
• In Deewaar, a mine owner puts an end to a strike by kidnapping the union leader's family and threatening to kill them unless he signs an agreement that's very unfavorable to the miners.
• John Milton in The Devil's Advocate is not only evil, but he's also actually Satan.
• Piet Smit from District 9 meets much of the criteria. He is the executive for a MegaCorp arms manufacturer who spends the film abusing the refugee aliens he was contracted to care for, experimenting on them to gain control of their weaponry, and even allowing his son-in-law to be dissected live just to gain control of these weapons, and then lying through his teeth to his heartbroken daughter about what's happening.
• In Dogma, Bartleby and Loki visit a board of executives and reveal each and every one (save for one female board member) to be guilty of something horrible. The worst of them has more skeletons in his closet than the rest of the board put together. After messing with their heads, Loki kills them all except the aforementioned woman (and he nearly offs her for not saying 'God bless you' when he sneezed).
• Jack Bennett, the CEO of Northmoor in Edge of Darkness (2010). Not only is he secretly working to make dirty bombs for the U.S. government under the guise of nuclear disarmament, he does not hesitate to fatally irradiate environmental activists or even his own employees to keep it quiet.
• John Carlyle from Elysium. He is such a bastard that he is more concerned about the cost of replacing a set of sheets than the man lying on them being fatally irradiated thanks to Carlyle's factory having No OSHA Compliance.
• In Fantastic Four (2005), Victor Von Doom/Doctor Doom is the leader of Doom Industries and being Doom, he is not the most honest CEO around.
• In Force of Nature: The Dry 2, Daniel Bailey runs an investment company that launders money for organized crime and allows white-collar criminals to evade tax.
• Downplayed in Ford v Ferrari with Ford senior executive vice president Leo Beebe. While not engaging in the typical form of corruption, Beebe does everything in his power to hinder or prevent Miles from racing for Ford. He excludes Miles from the '65 Le Mans team and conspires to have Miles slow down in the '66 race to prevent him from taking all of the glory, which costs Miles the win due to a technicality.
• Forrest Warrior: Ruthless logging boss Travis Thorne will do anything to drive people off the land and has already started logging before getting permission to. He also tries to rally support among the locals while promising jobs, all the while fully intending to import out of town loggers just out of spite.
• Another early cinematic example of this trope are Five Brains and Checkbooks from Frau im Mond. They are a mysterious international cabal of capitalists who are trying to hijack the upcoming Lunar spaceflight to control Moon's supposed gold reserves in order to take over world's economy.
• The plot of Fun with Dick and Jane kicks off with such a CEO destroying his company through fraud, Enron-style, and leaving his second in command and his head of PR to take the heat while he himself goes on to enjoy his millions.
• James McCullen a.k.a. Destro in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. The man is one of the founders of said evil organization and causes chaos worldwide, partially for the profit he will reap from selling weapons to everybody and partially to settle a grudge his family has fostered for generations with the governments of the world... because they helped foster conflict to keep on selling weapons to everybody and got caught.
• The Godfather movies have quite a few. Michael Corleone himself could possibly count as this, since it's all just business for him and his family. Those businesses (casinos) are slightly shadier than others, but it's the unofficial rule that violence is an accepted form of competition within the mob that leads to the worst of it. Despite this, Michael is important enough to be recognized and accepted by senators and other politicians.
• In Goldstone, Jimmy is the local manager for the Furnace Creek Mining Group. He is lying to his superiors in order to push through a crooked land deal; bribing local officials; turning a blind eye when one of his partners sanctions a murder; is importing Sex Slaves to work in a quasi-legal brothel; etc.
• Daniel Clamp, the Donald Trump parody in Gremlins 2: The New Batch, is a subversion; he's no great intellect and is more than a little thoughtless, vain, superficial, and shallow, but underneath it all, he seems to have a genuinely good heart. Reportedly, he was supposed to be one of these played straight, but John Glover was reportedly sick of playing villains and decided to play against the script.
• Halloween III: Season of the Witch: Conal Cochran, the CEO of the Silver Shamrock Novelty Company, plans to kill innumerable people through rigged Halloween masks simply For the Evulz, and because he's the descendant/reincarnation of an ancient, evil Druid.
• Alonzo Hawk in Herbie Rides Again. The man is a colossal Jerkass with no respect for anybody (not even family members) and a plan to buy and raze huge chunks of San Francisco and build his own office buildings. The film's climax involves him trying to demolish Grandma Steimetz's home with her still in it and part of his Establishing Character Moment is him accepting a humanitarian award his nephew got for him and telling him what a brilliant scam that was.
• Hot Fuzz: Subverted with Simon Skinner. Nicholas initially connects the series of murders to him and a land deal, but it turns out that he and the NWA were murdering people in a twisted attempt at winning a community award. His business tactics were quite ethical.
• Subverted in Inception. Saito may be willing to use corporate espionage and screw with his business opponent's mind, but he's a man of honor through and through. When faced with one of Cobb's partners trying to sell him out, instead of taking the guy up on his offer, he has him restrained, tells Cobb what the guy tried to do, and gives Cobb the chance to have revenge. In that same scene, he has Arthur and Cobb cornered, but he still gives them the choice to work for him or walk away instead of blackmailing them as you would expect from any other corporate hack in movies these days. Right before The Caper begins, Saito dismisses Cobb's worries that he'll be arrested as soon as the plane lands by saying that as soon as the job is done, he'll make a single phone call which will get Cobb past Immigration. At the job's end, despite having just spent decades of subjective time in Limbo and finally returning to reality... the first thing he does is pick up the phone, just as promised.
• Inspector Gadget (1999): Sanford Scolex a.k.a. Dr. Claw is the world's youngest billionaire and owner of Scolex Industries. He's also a complete madman who steals a robotic foot from the Bradford Robotics Laboratory and murders Artemus Bradford in the process. He blows up security officer John Brown (the soon-to-be Inspector Gadget) during his escape (ending up with his left hand being amputated in the process after it is crushed by Gadget's bowling ball, resulting in him becoming Dr. Claw) and copies the technology operating the foot in order to make android assassins that he could sell to armies all over the world.
• Averted in Irish Jam. The Japanese businessman Mr. Suzuki, who wants to build an amusement park on a small Irish island, is in fact an honorable man. It's Lord Hailstock, the local landlord, who is the corrupt one.
• It's a Wonderful Life: Mr. Potter owns the bank, and eventually almost every business in Bedford Falls, except for the Bailey Building and Loan. In the reality where he really owns everything, general conditions in town are horrific.
• A shtick of many, if not all James Bond villains.
  • Hugo Drax in Moonraker. Doesn't get more corrupt than using your company's resources to orchestrate a plan to annihilate all human life on Earth.
  • Elliot Carver in the James Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies is a corrupt media mogul who has no problem with covertly starting a war between China and the UK to jack up his ratings.
  • Gustav Graves in Die Another Day is a billionaire diamond magnate and snobbish British playboy who seems to be interested in alleviating world hunger with his new solar satellite but is actually Colonel Tan-Sun Moon, a renegade North Korean colonel who hopes to use the solar satellite to invade South Korea. He actually "gained" his wealth by illegally laundering conflict diamonds from Sierra Leone. He's also a Spoiled Brat and the Trope Namer for Majored in Western Hypocrisy: despite claiming to despise the West, he blatantly abuses foreign aid on sports cars and was educated in England.
  • Elektra King in The World Is Not Enough, daughter and heir to her father's Mediterranean oil pipeline, seduced her captor, murdered her father, kidnapped M, and plotted to destroy Istanbul so her pipeline would get more use. She's so much of a twisted villain, she's currently the only Bond Woman 007 himself has killed in cold blood.
  • Auric Goldfinger. A proper Bond villain. If you can't have the United States' gold reserves, you can always just destroy them. Wiping out the entire population of Fort Knox (civilian and military alike) and creating economic chaos in the West in the process is just collateral damage.
  • Max Zorin from A View to a Kill. How do you effectively corner the microchip market? Destroy Silicon Valley with a massive man-made earthquake. If the West Coast has to go with it? Collateral damage.
  • The whole American government in Quantum of Solace. Quantum itself is a shadowy group of corrupt politicians and businesspersons.
  • SPECTRE and its mysterious leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld are behind many criminal schemes involving Evil Plans of the Take Over the World variety. Its ruling council is a behind-the-scenes cabal of corrupt officials, politicians, terrorists and businesspersons — SPECTRE is essentially a shadow government whose members choose to operate in the dark.
    • Rosa Klebb is the former head of operations for SMERSH who secretly defected to SPECTRE.
    • Osato is the CEO of Osato Chemicals, to which SPECTRE is using it as a front for their Evil Plan to incite World War III between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
    • Max Denbigh/C is revealed to be this in Spectre, as he is using his position as head of the Joint Intelligence Service as a cover to let SPECTRE have back-door access to the world's intelligence agencies without anybody knowing anything about it.
    • Spectre also reveals that Quantum, the Nebulous Evil Organisation which Bond fought in Casino Royale (2006) and Quantum of Solace, is a sub-unit of SPECTRE itself.
• In Juncture, one of Anna's targets is a retired pharmaceutical company executive who okayed the dumping of toxic chemicals that caused a cancer cluster in a suburban development resulting in the deaths of several children.
• Jupiter Ascending: Kalem Abrasax is the head of the inter-galactic company Abrasax Industries, whose purpose is to harvest entire planets of life to create a rejuvenation drug. He also doubles as a Evil Overlord, due to being King of the Universe thanks to his status as Entitled.
• Jurassic Park:
  • In Jurassic World, Hoskins is convinced that Masrani is one of these. Nope, it's a Subverted Trope: Masrani is indeed an Honest Corporate Executive. Bone-headed, sometimes, but honest. The ironic part is Hoskins himself is arguably a Corrupt Corporate Executive (okay, chief of security, but he does take over the park after Masrani's death). How corrupt is he? He and Mad Scientist Dr. Wu had deliberately engineered the Indomitus Rex to be intelligent and vicious, then ordered the raptors to attack her, as a field test. Turns out they're trying to breed dinosaurs to replace conventional weapons in warfare.
  • Jurassic World Dominion reintroduces Dr. Lewis Dodgson, who is now the CEO of Biosyn after his first appearance in the first installment. To the public, he appears to be a trustworthy individual, but beneath his gentlemanly façade, however, lies a hidden agenda: to control the world's food supply by unleashing gigantic locusts to eat up all the crops not made by Biosyn, so humanity will have to buy his crops is they want to survive, resulting in him making even more money than he's already made.
• Killer/saurus: The CEO funding Professor Peterson's research agreed to do so. The tradeoff was that Peterson had to use the research to recreate a dinosaur so that he can have its DNA bioprinted into human to make human-dinosaur Super Soldiers. He feels no remorse for any researchers the project kills, and is willing to threaten Peterson to continue the project, sending in unwilling volunteers to complete the project.
• The Lazarus Effect has Mr. Wise, the owner of the rival pharmaceutical company and the Dean of the school. The latter allows the former to take all the protagonists' research, and the former spied on the team and sabotaged their research once they got results.
• Averted in Local Hero — an American oil company is planning to buy a coastal village in Scotland to turn into a refinery/distribution center, and the villagers are all delighted at the prospect of selling out. Meanwhile, the CEO's main interest seems to be what's in the night sky there.
• Bartholomew Bogue, the Big Bad of The Magnificent Seven (2016), is the 'Robber Baron' version, driving homesteaders off their land so that he can mine it for gold. Farraday even refers to him as 'Robber Baron' Bogue.
• In Major Grom: Plague Doctor, three out of four victims of the Plague Doctor are this: Olga Isayeva is a banker, Evgeny Zilchenko owns a massive garbage dump, and Albert Bekhtiev owns a real estate company. All three take advantage of ordinary people and the city's legacy.
• The Man from Colorado: Everything that Big Ed Carter does is strictly within the letter of the law but is still extremely unethical. He takes over the claims of all of independent miners, taking advantage of the law that says that if a miner does no work on his claim for three years, the claim lapse. However, the reason why the claims went unworked for three years was because the miners were all away fighting The American Civil War. When the miners return, he offers then jobs working in his mine for less than a living wage. He also arranges for the appointment of Owen as judge to ensure the local law is on his side.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Iron Man: Obidiah Stane has no problem with selling Stark Industries weapons to the Ten Rings under the table; Tony is aghast when he finds out, as it means that his uber-patriotic company has been "double-dealing" to terrorists and U.S. armed forces alike. Pepper later discovers that Stane made this deal in exchange for the Ten Rings using said weapons on Tony's convoy, all in order to advance his position in the company.
  • Justin Hammer from Iron Man 2 commissions a felon to help advance his company's projects after springing the aforementioned felon from prison.
  • Aldrich Killian from Iron Man 3 is the founder and CEO of A.I.M., which he uses to develop Extremis, a bioengineering process that can both regenerate intensive injuries and grant powerful superhuman abilities. Killian uses the former application to buy off the U.S. Vice President with a promise to cure his daughter's debilitating illness, the latter to create an army of Human Weapons, and manufactures a bin-Laden-esque terrorist to take credit for a rash of suicide bombings (actually those aforementioned superhumans literally exploding). His ultimate plan is to control both the world's greatest terrorist and the world's greatest superpower, and thus manipulate war for his own profit.
  • Darren Cross from Ant-Man is the CEO of his own company and thinks nothing of shrink-killing people who disagree with him, much less supplying weapons to HYDRA.
• Men at Work (1990): Maxwell Potterdam III is the head of a company that's been illegally dumping waste from its factory into the sea without a shred of guilt over the environmental damage that he's causing. When Jack Berger decides it's time to come clean and bring him down, Maxwell decides that Jack needs to be dealt with.
• Pretty much everybody in Miss Nobody has some personal corruption, but for the top spot, it's a duel between two of the executives at Judge Pharmaceuticals: Nether, who tries to push a clearly dangerous drug onto the market to make money, and Sarah Jane, who is a Serial Killer trying to get herself one Klingon Promotion after another.
• The Negotiation: Koo Gwan-su, CEO of Nine Electronics, is also a black market arms dealer with several fingers in the intelligence pie. He "came forward" with his tax evasion and was even rewarded by the government for his honesty.
• The Net (1995) has Bill Gates Captain Ersatz Jeff Gregg, who uses the Batman Gambit of a cyberterrorist ring to convince the US Government to use his anti-virus program — which is programmed with a backdoor to allow those in the know easy access.
• Newsies: Joseph Pulitzer raises the wholesale price of his newspapers by 10% because he wants more money (and who cares about the starving homeless orphans who have to pay for it?). Later, when his actions have provoked a strike that actually costs him money, he still won't back down, because giving in to demands from ragged street kids would make him look weak.
• Other People's Money: Larry "The Liquidator" Garfinkle is something of a reconstruction. While he is a corporate raider, he is completely honest about his intentions, and is offended when Jorgy's wife offers him her life savings to not strip her husband's company, comparing it to stealing from orphans. As he explains, the company is hilariously unprofitable and has been losing its investors' money for years, and all he's doing is making sure that they get anything of their money back. Larry is also a polite and genial guy, and never resorts to criminal acts or the type of shenanigans corporate raiders in fiction usually do.
• The Other Woman (2014) has Mark King. While the premise of the film involves his wife, Kate, joining forces with two other women who he cheated on her with to utterly humiliate him through a series of practical jokes, one of the women he cheated with, attorney Carly Whitten, manages to uncover he committed international fraud and intended to frame Kate for it. Towards the end of the film, the women return all the money to those Mark defrauded, sparing both him and Kate prison time, then he is fired, and Kate, after divorcing him, takes over his old position in the company.
• In Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge, Harv Posner is a property developer and owner of the mall. When the Matthews became the sole holdouts—refusing to sell their property so he could build the mall—he orders Volker to burn their house down: killing the Matthews and disfiguring their son Eric.
• Archie Channing from Quigley is this at first. He suffers a lack of goodness and understanding, accordingly treats all of his employees with contempt and hates dogs to boot. However, that all changes when he ends up in a car crash and ends up in Heaven, but after the angels there tell him that he never did a good deed in his life, they decide that he must be sent back to Earth in the form of an adorable Pomeranian named Quigley, all while supervised by his guardian angel, Sweeney. At the end of the film, Archie is able to amend his unforgiving ways and is able to make amends with his brother Woodward.
• Lord Cutler Beckett of the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies is one. He will not allow anything to get in the way of him obtaining profit for the East India Company (and himself), especially not pirates — and by the beginning of the third film, he uses his political accumen to force the Governor to enact martial laws with summary execution of anybody with the smallest suspicion of assisting or being a pirate, including children, in a grotesque conga line to the gallows working 24/7.
• Rampage (2018) has Claire and Brett Wyden, who have their company undertake illegal research into weaponizing genetic manipulation. When this creates the giant mutant animals that the movie focuses on, their reaction is to lure them to Chicago (putting countless innocent lives in the process) just for a chance to get DNA samples from them, while at the same time trying to frame their former employee Kate for their own actions. And during the climax, they take her hostage at gunpoint (while trying to kill Davis in the process) to try and force her to continue her research for them.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera has Rotti Largo, who used his corporation's wealth to push a bill legalizing organ repossession through Parliament.
• Steven Jacobs from Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the CEO of GenSys and is only interested in money. He becomes aware of Will's ethical breach and tries to blackmail him into continuing the Animal Testing using that information.
• RoboCop:
  • Richard "Dick" Jones from RoboCop (1987) is an Evil Chancellor form of the Corrupt Corporate Executive, since he is only the vice-president of OCP under the seemingly benign "Old Man". In RoboCop 2, the Old Man takes to the corruption like a duck to water. Seemingly the only remotely honest person working at OCP is Johnson, who was Bob Morton's #2 at Security Concepts, and he has some morally ambiguous dealings.
  • RoboCop (2014) has Raymond Sellars, the CEO of OmniCorp (a subsidiary of OCP). He sees Murphy as nothing more than a machine that is the property of OmniCorp. Thus, he sees nothing wrong with overriding Murphy's will with the machine components and then kidnapping and threatening his wife and kid.
• RoboGeisha: Both Hikaru Kageno and his father, Kenyama, heads of the Kagano Steel Manufacturing corporation. They kidnap and force young women into becoming their personal assassins, attempt to murder anyone and everyone who gets in their way, and they ultimately desire to destroy Japan to achieve their goals.
• The board of directors of the toy company in The Santa Clause are a mild example — not violently corrupt or even being jerks, just highly apathetic about selling nothing but violent toys to kids. Scott only realizes that there's a problem after he starts turning into Santa Claus.
• In Santa Claus: The Movie, the evil CEO B.Z. is firstly vilified as an evil CEO who knowingly produces unsafe toys for children. (Why he would make teddy bears stuffed with sawdust and nails when presumably other metal things that weren't construction nails — or just plain sawdust — probably would be cheaper isn't elaborated on... he's evil, get it?) When he gets the chance to market candy that will allow those who eat it to temporarily float or fly, he leaps at the chance to make millions and save his reputation, despite the fact that he has to (with no compunctions) Kick the Dog by shrugging off the knowledge that many children are likely to die due to the second, stronger version of the candy exploding if it gets too hot; he intends to take the money and escape to Rio before people find out about the danger.
• William Easton in Saw VI seems to be this, but he doesn't quite fit the mold, as shown each time he has to let someone die.
• Scanners III: The Takeover: When Helena takes over her father's pharmaceutical firm (after murdering him in cold blood), she takes the company in ethically dubious directions he would have objected to, uses her psychic powers to kill her professional rivals, and eventually tries to brainwash the world.
• In Shandra: The Jungle Girl, Travis Fox is a businessman who funds the expedition to locate Shandra so he can capture her, bring her back to the States, and sell her to the highest bidder.
• Shredder Orpheus: Hades and Persephone run a television network that entrances and kills viewers, already owning 85% of the corporate demographic and planning to corner the rest by tapping into the youth market.
• Slaxx has Harold Landsgrove, the CEO of Canadian Cotton Clothiers, and the store manager Craig. They both know about the sweatshop labor practices that CCC's suppliers are engaged in, even though they go against all the company's "ethical" branding, and don't care to fix the problem because it would threaten the company's bottom line and their jobs. The manager Craig gets most of the focus of the two; with a product launch to attend to and a CEO to impress, he cares more about his career with the company than the lives of his employees, even when a pair of jeans possessed by the ghost of Keerat, a 13-year-old farm laborer who died on one of the Indian plantations that supplied CCC's cotton, starts killing people. He even knocks out Libby when, after they find Lord's body, she tries to call the police, and later kills Shruti and tries to kill Libby to stop them from going public about CCC's labor practices, even though doing so is the only way to stop Keerat's Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Sure enough, when Keerat corners him, he gets one of the most brutal deaths in the film.
• The Big Bad of Smosh: The Movie, Steve YouTube, tries to trap Ian and Anthony in YouTube forever because their antics increase viewership in all the videos they find themselves in.
• Speed Racer: Arnold Royalton is part of a great, multi-generational corporate conspiracy to manipulate international racing competitions in order to manipulate motor company stock prices, and he's not adverse to join forces with the Mafia to commit murder off the track and ordering his drivers to cause "accidents" on the track to get what he wants.
• Spider-Man: Norman Osborn's first crimes committed as the Green Goblin are in direct relation to the success of Oscorp and his position as company head. He attempts to better Oscorp's situation by literally eliminating their leading competitor, Quest Aerospace. After being voted out of the company, he murders the board, which seems to have led to his reinstatement as chairman, since Harry was able to inherit the company after his death.
• The entire Nemoidian leadership of the Trade Federation in the Star Wars trilogy and they only get worse when they become part of the leadership of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, otherwise known as the Separatist Alliance. (Many sources reveal that greed and selfishness — not to mention cowardice — are very common among Nemoidians.) Other factions that lead the Separatist Army, like the Banking Clan, are cut from the same cloth.
• Tales from the Hood 2: Mr. Dumass Beach wants Mr. Simms to tell his police robot stories of crimes so that it better know which people should go to jail, with the ultimate aim of gaining a monopoly over both the law enforcement and prison markets.
• In Tall Tale, evil coal-mining magnate J.P. Stiles wants to turn Paradise Valley into a coal mine and will let nothing stand in his way.
• Eric Sacks from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014). His Evil Plan amounts to releasing a lethal biotoxin upon New York just so that he can profit from making an antidote.
• Paul F. Tomkins from Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, who turns out to actually be Satan. However, he isn't a corporate executive so much as a stage compere (Open Mike Guy).
• Daniel Plainview of There Will Be Blood is a sociopathic oil baron.
• Time Chasers: J.K. Robertson starts developing the protagonist's time machine as a weapon, destroys the future, refuses to not destroy the future for some reason, and eventually just starts shooting people in the Revolutionary War.
• Tommy Boy: Downplayed with Ray Zalinsky. He's not doing anything illegal per se, but he has little problem shuttering Callahan's factory and putting its employees out of work.
• Transformers: Dark of the Moon has Dylan Gould, who willingly helps the Decepticons. While it initially seems like he's under duress, it later becomes clear that he is, in some respects, eviller than the Decepticons.
• Record executive Reginald Charming from Tricky People is a pedophile who tells children that he'll help them get famous in order to trick them into coming to his studio.
• Ed Dillinger in TRON stole Kevin Flynn's ideas and used them to climb his way up the company's ladder, and is using his new power to fire or subvert anybody who protests.
  • To a lesser extent, the Chairman of the Board Richard Mackey in the sequel, even though he shows up for only one scene. Apparently, a color manual justifies labeling the same OS they have been selling for years and are charging top dollar to everybody as "new".
• Played for Laughs with Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder. The man is willing to allow one of his studio's most profitable stars to die at the hands of Vietnamese drug lords solely because his box office revenue is starting to decay.
• The Big Bad in The Tuxedo is Dietrich Banning, who owns a bottled water company. His plan is to infect the US water reservoirs with deadly bacteria in order to be the sole supplier of drinking water in the country. He also offers the deal to the heads of the heads of the other major bottled water companies, in exchange for 50% of their income.
• Unstoppable: There's a train going at full speed with no one driving it. It's filled with toxic, dangerous chemicals and eventually, it will crash. What does the head honcho guy (whose company is responsible for the train) say about this? "I'm not gonna put the company at risk just because some engineer wants to play hero!"^note Though he's more guilty of poor judgment, as he specifically states that he's trying to minimize the destruction the train will cause, i.e., doing a little damage in a remote area instead of a lot of damage (and death) in a larger area. Once his plans fail, he essentially gives up and tries to manage the impending PR disaster.
• Vice (2015) has Julian Michaels, the greedy head of the titular company, who allows customers to use, abuse and murder thousands of androids with human thoughts and feelings, just to fill his own wallet.
• Gordon Gekko of Wall Street is one of the most obvious. The man believes in becoming rich at any cost, including destroying the livelihoods of hundreds of people.
• In The War Wagon, Frank Pierce runs the Pierce Mining Co. He attempted to murder Taw Jackson and, when that failed, had him framed and sent to prison so that he can gain control of Jackson's land.
• Max Fairbanks in What's the Worst That Could Happen?. Amongst the corporate malfeasance seem in the film are declaring bankruptcy as an expediency to avoid corporate responsibility and attempting to bribe a senate subcommittee.
• Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit... and how! Being the sole stockholder of Cloverleaf Industries, he murders Marvin Acme, the owner of Toon Town (framing Roger for it in the process) and then tries his hardest to make certain that Acme's will is never discovered so that Cloverleaf can win the bidding war to buy Toon Town, so that he can demolish it and build a freeway. As if that weren't enough, his plan involves murdering every toon living there.
• The Wolverine:
  • Shingen Yashida from is a rich businessman with ties to the Yakuza.
  • Ichirō Yashida, in the end of his life. He secretly ran his company's finances to the ground to purchase everything he needed to steal Logan's Healing Factor and regenerate his body with it.

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