In a year defined by real-world AI hype and slash-and-burn politics, Hollywood found its perfect contemporary antagonist: the tech bro. Throughout 2025, a slew of major films, from superhero epics to slapstick reboots, have turned their gaze on the self-regarding, jargon-spouting digital visionary, casting them as the go-to villain for our times.
The Pantheon of Pompous Tech Titans
The trend was impossible to miss. In Netflix's lavish alt-history film The Electric State, Stanley Tucci played Ethan Skate, the bald and imperious creator of 'neurocaster' technology. Having quashed an AI uprising, his invention instead rendered the populace listless VR addicts, leaving Tucci to deliver sour existential proclamations from a retro Bond villain lair.
Meanwhile, in the blockbuster Superman, Nicholas Hoult's Lex Luthor embodied a particularly modern kind of evil: a billionaire desperate for talkshow appearances and incensed that a flying alien was getting more attention than his genius. His villainous plot involved rigging social media using an army of cyborg monkeys to spread anti-Superman memes—a scheme that felt uncomfortably close to reality.
From Funny to Psychotic: The Bro Spectrum
Some portrayals leaned into dark humour. In M3gan 2.0, Jemaine Clement's sleazy billionaire Alton Appleton met a humiliating end after being seduced and outsmarted by a fembot, his signature tech hacked and his prosthetic six-pack unstuck. Conversely, Danny Huston played a truly psychotic hybrid of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in The Naked Gun reboot. His character, Richard Cane, used his galactic profits to build a 'Primordial Law of Toughness' device to zap humanity back to a prehistoric mindset.
The satire extended to biotech in The Toxic Avenger reboot, where Kevin Bacon's pale, pampered 'healthstyle' guru Bob Garbinger mixed up Sisyphus and syphilis while flogging bio-boosters on TV—a clear dig at real-life immortality-seeking biohackers.
An All-Too-Plausible Nightmare
The most biting critique may have come from Jesse Armstrong's sharp satire, Mountainhead. The film isolated a group of the worst 'move fast, break stuff' billionaires in a remote ski lodge as Armageddon loomed. Cory Michael Smith played a Musk-like social media app owner spreading AI-augmented misinformation, capturing the glib tone of someone who views the world as a plaything. Watching these 'thought leaders' clumsily workshop how to exploit global chaos felt depressingly plausible.
As the line between Silicon Valley's disproportionate influence and cinematic fiction continues to blur, 2025's films asked a pressing question: having absorbed the pathologies of tech overlords in real life, must we also endure them as our primary source of big-screen escapism?
