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Villain Decay / Film

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Examples of Villain Decay in films.

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    Films — Animated 
  • Carface, the Big Bad of All Dogs Go to Heaven, was legitimately menacing in the original film (it was his henchmen who were incompetent jokes). The scene where he and his gang threaten Itchy at Charlie's Club may indeed be Nightmare Fuel for some. However, in All Dogs Go to Heaven 2, he loses several IQ points, and becomes the idiot henchman. The Villain Song, "It Feels So Good to Be Bad", sung by Satan to Carface, seems to be about reversing Villain Decay and going in the complete opposite direction, but nothing ever comes of it. Carface never really regains the menacing quality he had in the first film, and ends up being sent to Fire and Brimstone Hell because he made a really stupid Deal with the Devil. While this plot point seems to be retconned in the series, he seems to only get worse, ending up playing a Scrooge archetype in "An All Dogs Christmas Carol". This was a chain-smoking, gravel-voiced, Manipulative Bastard Bad Boss that waits until Charlie's wasted and rolls a car into Charlie that if he didn't die from the impact would drown, took everything Charlie had, manipulated an orphan for gambling tips, beat Itchy with a gang of Mooks within an inch of his life then almost killed Charlie again until he himself was eaten by King Gator. Essentially if you're a Don Bluth villain in a sequelized franchise, prepare to be decayed. The only way out of that is to never appear in the sequels at all, which many Bluth villains do not.
  • Downplayed in The Book of Life, Mary Beth's narration explains that Chakal was King of The Bandits, when his medal was taken back by Xibalba, he pretty much fell apart as he continued to search for it. He's still however an excellent fighter, and still leads his band of bandits - its just that he's no longer invincible.
  • Sharpteeth in The Land Before Time sequels. The original Sharptooth was an unstoppable killer and a true force of nature who had seemingly supernatural stamina. As the series continued (and became progressively more kiddy), all the carnivorous dinosaurs in general have decayed to the point of no return. It got so bad in The Land Before Time TV series that Littlefoot and the other kids were able to chase off two raptor-like Sharpteeth and one Tyrannosaur just by throwing fruit at them. It's especially bad considering how Red Claw is constantly referred to as the "biggest, meanest, most scary Sharptooth ever". Yes, the Tyrannosaurus rex that runs from some fruit is supposed to be more big, bad and gruesome than the Tyrannosaurus rex who violently ended the life of Mama Longneck and terrified both the dino-kids and real kids.
  • Lilo & Stitch franchise:
    • Good heavens, Captain Gantu.
      • In the original film, after Jumba has failed to retrieve his Experiment 626 whom Lilo names Stitch, the Grand Councilwoman sends Gantu to recover Stitch. He puts both Lilo and Stitch into the containment pod, only for Stitch to escape and help Nani, Jumba, and Pleakley rescue Lilo. After failing, Gantu is forcibly retired.
      • In Stitch! The Movie and Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Gantu finds himself stranded on Earth attempting to capture Jumba's experiments for Dr. Hämsterivel, with very few successes and he makes quite a number of bungles in the attempt. He also gets insulted a lot by his lazy reluctant sidekick, Reuben, who just so happens to be Jumba's Experiment 625.
      • In Leroy & Stitch, Hämsterviel replaces Gantu with Leroy and his clones, and Gantu makes his Heel–Face Turn, joining forces with Jumba, Pleakley, Lilo, Stitch, and Reuben to defeat Hämsterviel's army of Leroy clones, being reinstated as a captain by the Grand Councilwoman with Reuben as his galley officer.
      • In the Stitch! anime, set years after Leroy, Gantu lost his position in the Galactic Armada again (the English dub establishing that he was dishonorably discharged for singing karaoke badly at a United Galactic Federation holiday party) and returned to Hämsterviel's employ, becoming much more subservient to him (whereas in the first TV series, he had often complained of Hämsterviel and even tried to re-capture him on behalf of the UGF to get his old job back, which failed) and getting obsessed with a soap opera. He is also even less successful and gets humiliated more often in this series.
      • In Stitch & Ai, which is set on a separate post-Leroy timeline from the anime, Gantu actually remains Captain of the Galactic Armada and thus is technically no longer a villain. However, he's also removed from his status as a main character and doesn't bother to fight against the new Big Bads, the Jaboodies and the Woolagongs, who pose a major threat to the UGF yet the only things stopping them are their rivalry against each other and their shared but separate desire to get Stitch for themselves.
    • Dr. Hämsterviel also undergoes this in the Stitch! anime. In the first season, it's shown that he's now freed from Galactic Prison (which he has been stuck in during the first series), is more actively scheming against Stitch, and now possesses several of the experiments that he funded the creation of. In the first season finale, Hämsterviel actually brainwashed his former partner-in-crime Jumba to suck the magic out of the Chitama Spiritual Stone and transfer its power to himself, becoming so powerful that he easily overpowered Stitch and used a special vacuum that shrunk him and put him in a nigh-unbreakable American football-shaped glass container. Hämsterviel only lost when Yuna rescued Stitch and the Spiritual Stone temporarily transferred the rest of its power to the experiment, leading to him getting defeated in a one-to-one showdown, losing his stolen power, and getting arrested and sent to Galactic Prison along with Gantu and Reuben. In the second season, he, Gantu, and Reuben escape imprisonment but fail to defeat Stitch again, and Hämsterviel is unable to regain that stolen power. In the Denser and Wackier third season, a new big-eared humanoid alien character named Delia takes of Hämsterviel's position as the Big Bad, and he becomes subservient to her. He also suffers more humiliating defeats than in the first two seasons and goes through a Cool and Unusual Punishment each time he fails her, then gets arrested again along with her, Gantu, and Reuben at the end of this season. He does become the Big Bad again in the two post-series specials and becomes a threat again, but Stitch and company defeat him and send him, Gantu, and Reuben back to prison again both times.
  • In the first half of The Lion King (1994), Scar is a charming and brilliant schemer who manipulates everybody and achieves his goal of usurping the throne by killing his brother and sends his minions to kill his nephew, the heir. But after he becomes the new king, he devolves into a whiny and petty man-child who brings Pride Rock to ruin because of his incompetence as a leader.
  • In Monsters vs. Aliens, the first Humongous Mecha Gallaxhar sends to Earth ends up shrugging off anything the US Army can throw at it and proceeds to waste half of San Francisco before being brought down by the monsters (and the Golden Gate Bridge). Near the end of the film, when Gallaxhar orders his army of identical robots to stop Ginormica, they all end up crashing into one another and collapsing like dominoes.
  • Steele from Balto starts out as a mere bully to the title wolf-dog, but when a terrible epidemic threatens the village of Nome, and Balto is selected to bring the medicine to Nome, this makes Steele jealous, and at one point, Steele deliberately strands his own team, knowing that he is going to let everyone in Nome die because of this, and even tries to kill Balto when he tries to take the medicine from Steele. After Steele loses the fight, he deliberately sabotages Balto's team's journey to Nome to make sure they ultimately die in the freezing cold, then arrives at Nome alone, claiming that this is all just a tragedy in order to trick everyone into gaining Steele's trust. However, Jenna, Balto's love interest, and the rest of his friends don't believe him, knowing that Steele was lying the whole time. During the last third of the movie, Steele becomes more whiny and cowardly, until finally, Balto and his team finally safely arrive in Nome with the medicine needed to stop the epidemic, thus exposing all of Steele's crimes and as a result, everyone turns against Steele and start branding him as an outcast.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • By the late '40s, the classic Universal monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Invisible Man) were the subject of parodies starring Abbott and Costello. In the '90s, they decayed even further by becoming attractions at the Universal Studios theme parks in Hollywood and Orlando. As part of "Beetlejuice's Rock and Roll Graveyard Revue," they danced, sang, played instruments, and even rapped on stage. Fangoria magazine columnist David J. Schow wondered if, at some future date, audiences would be treated to a similar show starring Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, and Leatherface, and remarked that he couldn't wait to see how Hollywood would "pull the fangs" from that group of fun-lovers.
  • Star Wars:
    • General Grievous from the prequel movies. Viewers' first look at Grievous occurs during Star Wars: Clone Wars, in which the cyborg took on six Jedi at once and completely destroyed them without much effort, establishing him as an unstoppable killing machine. However, the series' production team developed the character independently from the films' team. For Grievous's live-action appearance, Lucas wrote him as a significantly lower threat. The live-action Obi-wan faces a significantly weaker Grievous and dispatches him fairly quickly all by himself. The second season of the animated series does justify the discrepancy by revealing more of Grievous's evasive nature and showing how he received the injuries he displays in the live-action film, but this was undermined when George Lucas declared both seasons non-canon to the rest of the Star Wars EU, a decision that stuck after Lucasfilm was sold of to Disney and the EU was rebooted. This problem was increased exponentially by the second animated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Suddenly Grievous lost constantly, whether it was physically in lightsaber duels or strategically by being outmaneuvered by the heroes at every turn. In its later seasons, Star Wars: The Clone Wars does its best to redress the balance but the damage had already been done.
    • Anakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader despite often being the face of the franchise gets hit with this in Star Wars Legends. Whilst in the Original Trilogy Vader goes virtually unstoppable and undefeated as The Dragon up until the third movie where Luke finally overpowers him when enraged (which Anakin quickly makes up for it by taking down Palpatine in his Heel–Face Turn) the EU media by comparison were far less concerned with maintaining Vader’s threat and badassery. Notably Legends Vader almost got killed because a random surviving Jedi pressed one of the buttons on his suit, on another occasion well-prepared Tusken Raider was able to critically injure him and most infamously of all Galen Marek aka Starkiller his edgy clone could defeat and trap him. Miraculously these years of Villain Decay were actually undone by the Disney Canon which thanks to the Darth Vader comics, Rogue One, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor reestablish Darth Vader as The Dreaded One-Man Army whom even a highly capable assassin droid calculates is impossible for him to kill and just gives up.
    • General Armitage Hux is introduced in The Force Awakens as a cold, hardened, intimidating military general. He acts as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute to Grand Moff Tarkin, even to the point of using a super weapon to blow up multiple planets. In The Last Jedi however, he's very quickly reduced to a pompous buffoon, and the lack of respect given to him by his enemies, superiors, and subordinates reaches comical levels. Poe humiliates him with the equivalent of a Prank Call in order to stall time; his own subordinate indirectly calls him an idiot when he comments that his fleet's fighters should have been scrambled "five bloody minutes ago", and this step not being taken directly leads to the destruction of an entire dreadnought; Supreme Leader Snoke uses the Force to smack him around for failure in front of his men when he tries to save face by taking the call in his office; and Kylo Ren continues to treat him with no respect, Force choking and throwing him around like a rag-doll for raising objections, with even his own subordinates not batting an eye at it anymore. By the time of The Rise of Skywalker, Hux is reduced to actively undermining his own side's war effort purely out of spite for his boss, an act that gets him killed when his cover story fails to cover his tracks. Oops.
  • Godzilla
  • James Bond
  • Aliens in the Alien series. The first installment was a horror film in space, with a single, nearly invincible alien stalking and killing the helpless crew of a spaceship, with numerous rape parallels. However, the sequel Aliens was an action film, where a swarm of xenomorphs overwhelm a squad of space marines by virtue of sheer numbers (although this is justified due to the crew of the first film being completely unarmed and most of the cast of the second film being a large team of highly trained and heavily armed marines. Even then, it should be noted that the first encounter between the marines and the aliens results in the marines losing over half of their force before they flee.) Alien³ reversed this somewhat by having a single alien killing more and more people in an old prison, before Alien: Resurrection reduced them to the status of generic movie monster, albeit a still dangerous one. Since then, xenomorphs have increasingly been depicted as cannon fodder. The merchandise has further stripped the Alien of its mystique and creepy sexual undertones. The Alien vs. Predator series further decayed the villainy by focusing on kaiju-style monster battles. Pop culture has also participated in the decay with increasingly parodic tie-in marketing in the form of plush, Lego, superdeformed, etc.
  • Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm Street. In the original film, he was the menacing personification of evil; over the course of the various films that followed he gradually became an increasingly camp wise-cracking court jester. This was reflected in his marketing — he cut an album of cheesy pop songs, guest-rapped on a hip-hop track by The Fat Boys about his antics, was rapped about in a different Will Smith track, and was subject to all kinds of tie-in merchandise including yo-yos. It took years and the return of Wes Craven (in Wes Craven's New Nightmare) to address and attempt to reverse his decay. (In fact, the decay was Deconstructed, as Freddy showed up on a talk show to high five the audience, while Nancy stated Freddy was now like Santa Claus, all kids knew who he was.)
  • Transformers Film Series
    • Megatron is the menacing Sealed Evil in a Can Big Bad of the first movie, destroying whole cities and causing the only on-screen fatality of the movie. By the sequel, he's just The Dragon to the real Big Bad, The Fallen, and more or less just argues with Starscream for the second half of the movie despite managing to kill Optimus, which is negated by how he gets stomped by the revived and stronger Optimus. In Dark of the Moon, he's injured for the entirety of the film due to still suffering from the beatdown he got at the end of the last movie, doesn't get a single kill, and gets defeated along with the Bigger Bad in a matter of seconds. Then Transformers: Age of Extinction comes around and the Not Quite Dead Megatron uploads his brain to a new body, regaining his menace in the process under the new name of Galvatron... only to suddenly return to calling himself Megatron again in the next movie. Worse, he's once again the mook to the real big bad and gets ONE scene with Optimus that is nothing more than a 30-second Curb-Stomp Battle that ends with him getting tossed away from combat and out of the movie. The planned final movie would've clearly killed him off for good had the failure of this last one not done the entire series in.
    • Starscream. He easily defeats two of the Autobots in the movie, but in Revenge of the Fallen, he spends most of the movie reduced to being a joke and does not fare well in the third film either.
  • The first time around in The Mummy (1999) Imhotep is a walking plague, causing fire to fall from the sky, hordes of locusts and rivers to run with blood. In The Mummy Returns, he's just some guy with telekinesis who trades banter with an eight-year-old.
  • The Matrix
    • The Agents may qualify on the surface. They went from being the scourge of the virtual world and the most dangerous entity that could be encountered in the first film, to suddenly being little more than cannon fodder in the two sequels. However, while Neo has little problem dealing with them once he becomes the One, they are still a quite significant threat to everyone else.
    • Averted with former Agent Smith. After being destroyed by Neo at the conclusion of The Matrix Smith becomes effectively a virus that, especially after assimilating everyone in the Matrix, including The Oracle and her powers, Smith is completely unstoppable by anyone or anything—at least until the literally-named Deus Ex Machina from outside the Matrix, with a little help from Neo, saves the day.
    • Somewhat subverted further in The Matrix Resurrections with Smith's return. One questions why the machines would even re-create him after the trouble he gave them last time, but while his memories are kept and his menace is left intact (he nearly wins his rematch against Neo), he's only undermined in that he's not the main villain this time around and ends up teaming up with Neo and Trinity by the end in a brief Enemy Mine situation. Played straight with the remaining agents in that they're phased out between movies for the rather terrifying "Horde Mode" setting that turns regular people in the Matrix into a violent, relentless mob.
  • Halloween
  • In the first Jurassic Park movie, the T. rex is an unstoppable monster, who can't be fought and only run from. She takes on the other villains of the piece in the final scene and kills them with ease. Her face is the symbol of the franchise. In the second film, more of the same, only with a much higher body count. Third film? Hit by The Worf Effect: Killed unceremoniously by a dinosaur most dinosaur experts say would make for a very boring battle where nobody can winnote , even being replaced on the franchise symbol. Villain decay indeed. In the fourth film, Rexy (the same one from the first film) and a raptor tag-team the new hybrid Indominus rex, with some help from a Mosasaurus. As a callback to the third film, when Rexy shows up, she smashes through the skeleton model of a Spinosaurus, the same dino who killed another T. rex in the third film.
  • The first bug we see in action in Starship Troopers withstands the combined fire of four mobile infantry before going down. Later on bugs are seen taken down by just a few rounds. Justified by in-universe research into how best to direct rifle fire; we even see a clip of a training film.
  • Discussed in-universe in The Godfather
    Sollozzo: All due respect, the Don, rest in peace, was slippin'. Ten years ago could I have gotten to him?
  • The Djinn of the Wishmaster series was scary and so much of a threat in the first film because he was utterly evil beyond redemption, completely immortal, his powers knew almost no bounds, and he would bring about hell on Earth if he got his three wishes. What stopped him from being an Invincible Villain was that the entire plan hinges on granting wishes, so the protagonist could technically stop it by not wishing at all and had to be constantly wary of saying anything that could possibly be interpreted by the evil Djinn as one. In the second film, he suddenly has to collect 1000 souls first, and much of the plot placed him in prison, where he was significantly less menacing as a villain. The third and fourth films continue the process by making the Djinn killable, and having to pursue romance with a woman.
  • Hannibal Lecter was a genuinely horrible character in the original two novels and films involving him, however, by Hannibal Rising Lecter was rather a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds with a full set of Freudian excuses to explain for his deranged behavior, plus he only killed Asshole Victims by then.
  • Pinhead of Hellraiser series is a rare inversion. In making him more evil (and usually the main villain) after the second film, the writers also made him less interesting. He's also an odd case in that how malevolent he is goes back and forth across the films. He's pure evil in the third and fourth films; the fifth, sixth and seventh installments feature Pinhead about as much as the first two and in the eighth, the real Pinhead only shows up at the end.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Loki. He doesn't actually become less competent after his first defeats in Thor and The Avengers (2012), but a combination of more dangerous villains and shared interests with Thor lead him to be less of a scary villain and more of an occasionally comedic antihero. He does try to betray the heroes on multiple occasions after that point, but, as his brother points out in Thor: Ragnarok, he's become predictable. To reflect this he’s killed easily by Thanos in the Cold Open to Avengers: Infinity War.
    • Thanos in the opening of Avengers: Endgame becomes this. After giving an incredibly difficult fight and effectively winning in the last film, he is subdued and killed very easily by the surviving Avengers. It's well-justified, as he was alone, injured, and had destroyed the Infinity Stones—not to mention, he didn't really care about putting up a fight anyway. Word of God says that he allowed the Avengers to kill him. Averted later on in the film, where Thanos's past counterpart remains just as dangerous as ever.
    • Subverted brilliantly with the Raimi’s Green Goblin in Spider-Man: No Way Home. It would’ve been very easy for Goblin in the years since 2002 to be a laughable non-threat compared to MCU’s standards and the film even makes you think that way with both MCU Spidey and Doctor Strange finding him silly (Peter calling him a “Flying Green Elf”) and he even reverts back to his pitiful Norman persona early on just to keep the good guys and audience off-guard. By the third act however the Goblin reaffirms why he’s one of the best villains Marvel has: beating the shit out of MCU Spidey, making him watch as he kills Aunt May in front of him and almost kills Doctor Strange while destroying the Spellcube — forcing MCU Peter to have make everyone forget his existence before reality splits apart and villains from other universes flood the MCU. To say Norman Came Back Strong is a massive understatement.
  • In the Terminator franchise, Skynet (and by extension, the titular Terminators) become increasingly prone to this as the films march on:
    • The Terminators get Monster Threat Expiration as the series wears on. In the first film, Kyle Reese describes the T-800 sent back to kill Sarah Connor as "fully-armored chassis, very tough to kill", and the events of the film (and its sequel) bear this out; the first T-800 survives being blown in half, while the second ("Uncle Bob") survives being impaled and nearly drained of its power supply by the T-1000. As the films move further along, however, it becomes easier (and characters are much more prepared) to deal with them. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles depicted Terminators being routinely smashed, run over, impaled and blown up by other characters, even with tactics such as sustained small-arms fire. Terminator Genisys had the original T-800 sent to 1984 (and a T-1000) fall due to a combination of a single anti-personnel rifle round/shotgun and acid rain, respectively.
    • Both the original film and its sequel make it clear that Skynet sent a Terminator (later two) into the past once the human Resistance smashed its defense grid and were seemingly minutes away from destroying it completely. As additional sequels were made, however, Skynet suddenly gains more and more ability to send additional Terminators into the past, to a bewildering level that raises questions about just how omnipotent it was at the time. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Skynet sends back a Terminator model that's explicitly more powerful than The Dreaded T-1000, while in the Alternate Continuity series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Skynet is constantly throwing Terminators into the past at various points in the timeline. Terminator Genisys also reveals that Skynet has (a) a fully stocked line of T-800's on ice that can be activated and sent through time when needed, and (b) an Alternate Universe version of Skynet has an "avatar" who somehow has the ability to jump into different timelines. Terminator: Dark Fate goes back to the well of "throwing whatever sticks" by revealing that Skynet sent multiple Terminators to different points over a twenty-five year span (even after it was explicitly destroyed in T2) before revealing that it was replaced with a Suspiciously Similar Substitute called "Legion".
    • It becomes increasingly clear that sending Terminators back to kill targets is a horribly inefficent plan. T1 and T2 chalk up Skynet's plans to pure desperation, with the two villainous units seemingly being the only ones they can send on short notice. Later works in the franchise show more and more of them travelling through the past — and opting to attack targets with guns or melee attacks rather than rely on subterfuge, biological attacks, chemical weapons or any other sort of plan that is harmless to machines but lethal to humans. Making this even more notable is that (in both Terminator Salvation and the Continuity Reboot Dark Fate), Skynet appears to be aware in both cases that it's failed, but still doesn't change its tactics. Other works even made it so that the T-850 models had unshielded nuclear fuel cells (two, to be specific), but refuse to utilize them in favor of the same old tactics that didn't work before. Terminator Genisys implies that Skynet learned from its mistakes (via sending a T-1000 to try to kill Sarah Connor as a child, and creating an enemy [the T-5000] that can infect others with nanomachines), then drops the act when the Resistance sends a Terminator to protect Sarah as a child, and the T-5000 only infects one single person before disappearing completely from the storyline.
  • Scarecrow appeared as the Big Bad in Batman Begins, mostly responsible for the plan of contaminating Gotham's water supply to drive its inhabitants insane. After being beaten in that film, by The Dark Knight, he's reduced to little more than a petty drug dealer. In The Dark Knight Rises, he appears again as an escapee who acts as a judge and once again has little impact on the story.
  • Inverted by George Romero's Living Dead Series. The zombies got more dangerous, monstrous, and infectious with each passing film. At first they were very slow and could be fought off by hand in low enough numbers; by the later movies even trying that will get you bitten or Eaten Alive immediately. Also, the zombies gradually develop sentience that makes them better hunters.
  • In the Scream films, Ghostface had started to become less effective in their kills as the franchise goes on, so pathetic that the survivors had stopped being scared of them and simply fight back against their threats. With Scream VI being at their worst, epically failing to murder any of the returning characters.

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