Mad Scientist / Live-Action Films

• Most of the traditional image of the Mad Scientist probably derives from various adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, especially the 1931 movie: "It's alive! IT'S ALIVE!" The original book is wildly different — see Literature.
• The 1931 Frankenstein and other horror films of the time also drew heavily for their portrayals of mad scientists on Rotwang in Fritz Lang's classic 1927 SF film Metropolis. Rotwang, in turn, draws on the Mad Scientist depictions of Frankenstein in nineteenth-century stage melodrama. It's worth pointing out that Rotwang from Metropolis is not only the earlier Trope Maker, but was himself largely inspired by the popularity of the wild-haired, heavily accented Einstein and other "eccentric German physicists" at the time who were upending people's notions of the limits of science in an unsettling manner. They helped inspire the image of the Reluctant Mad Scientist who is obsessed with his research and doesn't really expect it to be misused.
• Peter Weyland in Prometheus, whose Villainous Legacy ended up making him an Unwitting Instigator of Doom for the entire Alien franchise. He was a Child Prodigy who single-handedly revolutionized human science and society, and invented Ridiculously Human Robots. He also was an Immortality Seeker with a god complex mixed with Nietzschean Übermensch pretensions, comparing himself to Prometheus giving mankind fire and government regulations to Zeus holding him back. The ambitious corporate culture he created resulted in the MegaCorp he founded becoming a full-on Evil, Inc. after his death.
• Attack of the Killer Donuts: John's Uncle Luther is the one who's animation serum lead to the events of the movie. He's introduced testing it on a dead rat, which then comes to life and attacks him, giving him a bite wound on his shoulder.
• Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!: Dr. Putrid T. Gangrene qualifies, what with his diabolical plans to conquer the world with giant killer tomatoes, tomatoes turned into people, people turned into tomatoes, etc., etc. Don't call him mad, though. HE IS NOT MAD. A little angry sometimes, but not mad!
• In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tony Stark tells Bruce Banner that they need to own up to the fact that they both are mad scientists as his justification for going through with creating the Vision.
• The Back to the Future trilogy has Emmett L. Brown, who is a bit more cuddly than your average Mad Scientist. Then again, this is the man who stole weapons grade plutonium from Libyan terrorists and promised to build them a nuke (he lied).
  Dr. Brown: They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn gave them a shoddy bomb-casing full of used pinball machine parts!
  • If that's not enough, he has a good deal of inventions in his garage lab, many of which don't work the way he wanted to. That said, he still has some successful ones, such as a fridge made from huge parts in 1885 Hill Valley or his famous DeLorean time machine which used his swindled plutonium. He also proves to be just as zany when upgrading his Time Machine, giving it a new, more efficient energy converter/reactor and giving it flying circuits in 2015. He even built another time machine out of a steam locomotive!
• Barbarella: Big Bad Durand Durand is a brilliant scientist who prefers using his intellect to make powerful weapons and creative torture and execution devices, and he plans to use the former to take over the universe (he reveals this complete with an Evil Laugh).
• In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Lex Luthor is both a gifted scientist and extremely mad, going so far as to use the knowledge and resources of a Kryptonian ship downed during General Zod's attack on Metropolis and the corpse of Zod himself to do a Dr. Frankenstein and create Doomsday, an almost unstoppable killing machine. He seems a good deal less crazy after escaping from Arkham Asylum in Justice League.
• In Bats, it is revealed that Dr. McCabe created the bats with the specific intention of killing people (rather that is being an accident as he originally claimed). He is killed attempting to communicate with them.
• Black Sheep (2007): Though Astrid Rush is ostensibly trying to create genetically enhanced sheep, she's rather happy to find an instance of a man turning into a weresheep. And there was that thing about leeches.
• Bride of the Monster has Professor Doctor Eric Vornoff who completely lives this trope. He has a Mad Scientist Laboratory, an Igor, an eastern European accent, he wants to prove people who called him mad wrong, he has an Evil Laugh and his plan is to create a race of atomic supermen to conquer the world. He's played by Bela Lugosi after all who chews the scenery a lot.
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Dr. Caligari is a little bit of this and a little bit of Circus of Fear.
• The Cars That Ate Paris: The Frontier Doctor enjoys lobotomising his patients, and Victorian Herr Doktor Dobbin collects and measures the skulls of criminals like Mad Dog Morgan.
• The Clones of Bruce Lee: Dr. Nai may have been influenced by Thomas Edison; he's a mad scientist who actually has other people do all the inventing for him, such as a vegetation-destroyer, while he wears a business suit and yells at his scientists to invent faster.
• The Creeps: Dr. Winston Berber stole the manuscripts of four classic monsters to place in his device, the "Archetype Inducer", which has the power to bring fictional characters to life in the real world. His plan is to make an army of monsters who will do his bidding.
• The Dam Busters: Barnes Wallis is a Downplayed Mad Scientist who invents the bouncing bomb and perfects its design to enable an attack on major German dams as part of Operation Chastise.
• Day of the Dead (1985). Dr. Matthew Logan, nicknamed "Frankenstein" by the soldiers. He is so obsessed with his work he fails to consider how the soldiers will react to him cutting up their deceased comrades for his experiments.
• In Dracula vs. Frankenstein, wheelchair-bound mad scientist Dr. Durea, the last descendant of the original Dr. Frankenstein, takes to murdering young girls for experimentation in hopes of perfecting a blood serum of his own creation with help from his mute, simple-minded assistant Groton. Durea hopes the serum will heal his crippled legs and cure Groton of his condition.
• Edward Scissorhands: Vincent Price might just be the kindliest Mad Scientist ever. His second-most-impressive creation (after Edward) is a giant cookie-making machine. And he creates Edward with the expressed desire to see if it's possible to make an artificial being with human love. And then amuses both of them with silly poetry later. Aw!
• The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein: Victor Frankenstein (of course), and his nemesis Cagliostro, who is both a Mad Scientist and an Evil Sorcerer. Frankenstein declares that Cagliostro is his equal in the understanding of science.
• Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask has a skit featuring Dr. Bernardo, a mad sex analyst whose experiments include measuring premature ejaculation on a hippopotamus and building a 400-foot diaphragm. ("Contraception for the entire nation at once!") The segment ends with Allen's character battling one of the doctor's creations — a gigantic, disembodied human breast.
• Ex Machina: Nathan is a reclusive and secretive creator of artificial people, who considers himself a god and thinks nothing of destroying them in his sick experiments.
• The Fly (1986): Seth Brundle, but he doesn't start out that way. Prior to his fateful teleportation (an impulsive choice he makes while he's drunk) he's a subversion. He's driven, doesn't have great social skills, and is — well — working on teleportation, but he is a sane man working for the greater good with a clear ethical code. Post-teleportation, a gradual Split-Personality Takeover (plus, at least before he learns what's happening to him, a Drunk with Power feeling) turns him into a straight version of the trope, albeit a sympathetic one — he is desperate to hold back the ruthless, remorseless insect nature that now dwells in him, but he'll use any means necessary to do so.
• Forbidden Planet. Lampshaded by Dr Morbius after demonstrating that Robby the Robot is Three Laws-Compliant, saying that even if he was the proverbial mad scientist of the "tape thrillers", he could not possibly harm anyone with the technology he has. Turns out Morbius has other attributes of a mad scientist like hubris, lack of self-awareness, and a failure to think things through. And of course a beautiful daughter.
• In Frankenstein 1970, Victor von Frankenstein is obsessed with continuing his ancestor's work. He plans to revivify the original Frankenstein Monster, but give it his own face, so the Frankenstein line may continue.
• Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks: His name is Count Frankenstein and he is attempting to revivify the dead. Take a wild guess.
• In Frankenstein Island, Sheila Frankenstein, her husband Dr. Van Helsing, and Dr. Frankenstein all count. The entire island is set up to allow Dr. Frankenstein to continue his blasphemous work from beyond the grave by using Van Helsing as a psychic conduit.
• In The Freakmaker, Professor Nolter is obsessed with creating a race of human/plant hybrids and is kidnapping and experimenting on unwilling victims as of way of achieving this.
• Ghostbusters (2016): Jillian Holtzmann, the one who builds all their gadgets, has no regard for safety procedures, habitually makes new weapons with no discernible purpose (what do they need a laser bear-trap that sends ghosts to Michigan for?), and when Patty shows up with a hearse is excited at the possibility of there being a dead body in the back ("do you know how many uses that could have?") and later paints said hearse white and bolts a siren and a nuclear reactor to the top. While Rowan uses the other Ghostbusters' research to make devices that summon ghosts in an attempt to get revenge at the world.
• Godzilla:
  • Gojira has Dr. Daisuke Serizawa, who invents the Oxygen Destroyer that ultimately kills Godzilla. However, he isn't evil; he's more of a Reluctant Mad Scientist.
  • Godzilla vs. Biollante: Dr. Shiragam's experimental fusion of Godzilla's DNA, Rose DNA, and the DNA of his deceased daughter ends up causing the creation of Biollante. He's not evil either, but he's certainly mad with grief over the loss of his daughter.
  • Terror of Mechagodzilla has Dr. Mafune, who not only turns his own daughter into a cyborg but he also invents a device that allows him to control the sea monster Titanosaurus.
• Gremlins 2: The New Batch: Doctor Catheter, played to the hilt by Christopher Lee. Interestingly he subverts it later on when he rejects his experiments as immoral, and vows that he will not commit cruel genetic experiments on animals again.
• Doctor Moreau, probably one of the best well-known Mad Scientists in pop culture, appears in several films, most notably Island of Lost Souls (1932) played by Charles Laughton, in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) played by Burt Lancaster and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) played by Marlon Brando. In all films is a crazy scientist trying to turn animals into humans.
• Help!: Professor Foot. Lampshaded by John when he says "This is absurd! You're nothing but a trite, hackneyed mad scientist!"
• James Bond occasionally runs into some of these, including in his movie debut. He also works with one, if you consider his Gadgeteer Genius and weapons man Q to be as "mad", given his role involves designing and constructing lethal assassination weapons disguised as ordinary items.
  • The villain of the very first official Bond movie is the titular mad scientist Dr. No, half-German half-Chinese genius in Nuclear Physics and an agent of the Nebulous Evil Organization known as S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Bond investigates him after he orders the murder of a fellow British agent who was snooping into his business- toppling American missiles to prove the power of his organization, a task assigned to him due to his unique understanding of nuclear radiation (his weapon of choice in this mission). Bonus points for his more personal motive of wanting revenge on America AND Russia for rejecting him when he offered his services, as well as his experiments accidentally costing him the use of both hands, forcing him to rely on metal hands of his own design.
  • Mr. Ling, the Evil Genius and Red Chinese agent working with Goldfinger, is a specialist in nuclear fusion and in charge of helping the evil eponymous businessman detonate a nuclear weapon in Fort Knox in an attempt to cripple the American economy and increase the value of his gold supply.
  • A View to a Kill: Herr Doktor Carl Mortner is a Mengele-sque eugenicist who conducted a Super Breeding Program in an effort to create the "ideal" soldier for the Nazis. While most experiments failed, the few Designer Babies that survived became highly intelligent — but also sociopathic due to the Psycho Serums used. Max Zorin and May Day are the two only such surviving "experiment results".
  • Dr. Valdo Obruchev in No Time to Die. He conceived Heracles, a devastating mix of Nanomachines and The Plague that spreads via touch and can be programmed to target specific people based on genetics. He gladly accepts working for Lyutsifer Safin and even suggests to use it to wipe out entire ethniticities. Saying the latter out loud ends up being his last mistake.
• Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter has Maria Frankenstein, who experiments on the inhabitants of a Mexican village in an effort to recreate her grandfather's Brain Transplant technique. Her brother Rudolph has the same skills, but is plagued by a pesky conscience.
• Jurassic World: Dr Wu angrily denies the trope when the Indominus rex appears to have Gone Horribly Wrong but we discover there's plenty of justification for it in his case, as he was secretly creating a dinosaur to demonstrate the potential of weaponised hybrids.
• Kiss Me Quick! has Dr. Breedlove who is creating a race of Sexbots and other sex related mad science in his Mad Scientist Laboratory.
• Dr. Laurience in The Man Who Changed His Mind. Already obsessed with the idea of transferring souls between bodies, he descends into full insanity when the scientific community rejects his theories and literally laughs him out of the room.
• The Man with Two Brains: Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr eventually becomes one of these — or, rather, a parody of one:
  German Detective: You're playing God!
  Michael: Somebody's got to!
• The Mosquito Coast starring Harrison Ford is a non-Science Fiction example. Ford plays an engineer who specializes in refrigeration technology; only problem is, most people already have fridges and air conditioners. So he moves his whole family out to the jungle in the middle of nowhere and builds a giant refrigeration machine just so his talents will be better appreciated. This isn't enough to satisfy his budding megalomania, so he goes on a quest to show a block of ice to some reclusive tribals who have never seen it, presumably so everyone would ooh and ahh over it and him.
• Mystery Men: Dr. Heller is on the side of justice, but definitely not right in the head. Lampshaded when the Bowler criticizes their decision to call on him for help:
  The Bowler: See, this is why a mad scientist is generally not preferable to a garden-variety regular scientist.
• In The Neanderthal Man, an anthropologist creates a serum that can temporarily reverse a million years of evolution in order to prove his theory that Neanderthals were smarter than humans. When he tests the serum on himself, he turns into a murderous ape-man.
• Nightwish: The professor eventually takes his students captive to force them to cooperate with his dangerous experiments to investigate ghost activity. He even fatally stabs his assistant in the gut when he threatens to expose what the professor is doing.
• La piel que habito: Dr. Robert is a plastic surgeon who lost his wife in a automobile fire and seeks solace in recreating her appearance on an unwilling victim.
• Poor Things has Godwin Baxter, who is not only a mad surgeon and low-key Maker of Monsters, but whose Bizarre Human Biology and Scary Stitches were inflicted on him by his father, who was clearly even madder.
• The Prestige gives you two for one. Nikola Tesla (played by David Bowie) builds a matter duplicator, which one of the two main protagonists (antagonists?) uses to perform an "impossible" magic trick. The scientist is mad (see Real Life) and so is the magician who uses his device.
• The Princess Bride: While Count Rugen isn't technically a scientist in the modern sense, he does treat torture as a science, having built a complex machine for "sucking the life" from his victims x number of years at a time. After he sucks a year of life out of Wesley he even asks Wesley how it felt, for the sake of his "research".
  Rugen (pen poised over paper): And remember: this is for posterity, so... be honest.
• Re-Animator: Dr. Herbert West is driven Faustially to perfect his corpse-resurrecting Re-Agent formula.
• The Return of Swamp Thing: Dr. Rochelle is more interested in causing mutations than researching the key to eternal life like his boss would want him to.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Dr. Frank N. Furter, who is also a Villainous Crossdresser. (Although it's hinted that Furter's "butler" Riff Raff is the one who did most of the actual Mad-Sciencing, with Furter characteristically stealing the credit.)
• In Scanners II: The New Order, Dr. Morse uses his neurological research institute to enslave psychics with his dangerous drugs and use them for Commander Forrester's megalomaniac purposes.
• Sharkenstein: Klaus is a former Nazi scientist who's continued to work on a project from World War II that involved the brain and heart of Frankenstein's Monster. To that end, he made an Artificial Zombie shark out of the body parts of several different sharks, and planned to put the brain and heart in it. His ultimate end goal was to create an army of Frankensharks to sic upon the world.
• Spiders II: Breeding Ground: A mad geneticist named Dr. Grbac is having people kidnapped by the corrupt crew of a cargo transport ship to implant them with Giant Spider eggs. He gets Hoist by His Own Petard.
• The Spiderwick Chronicles has Arthur Spiderwick.
• Wonder Woman (2017): Dr. Poison has dedicated her life to creating new painful and horrific chemical weapons, at least one of which she tested on herself. She is downright giddy when observing people dying under the effects of her creations.
• X-Men Film Series: In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Bolivar Trask’s main scientific objective seems to be genocide-via-robot, though he's rather subdued for the archetype.