Are Villains the Next Trend?

Disney unveiled the teaser trailer for their new "Maleficent" movie with Angelina Jolie this week. It seems to be following in the footsteps of "Wicked," which turned the Wicked Witch of the West into a misunderstood antihero, and the "Once Upon a Time" series, which has humanized and complicated several Disney villains, most notably the Queen from "Snow White," Rumpelstiltskin, and Captain Hook. A good villain or monster has always been an object of fascination, capable of anchoring their own lucrative franchises like "Hannibal" and "Dracula." With the rise of antiheroes on television, characters with many shades of gray are all the rage.

So villains are enjoying a higher profile than ever before. Even the media that doesn't explicitly put the villain front and center often features marketing that does. With so many superhero franchises churning out so many different installments, it's often the villains who are getting the most press, simply because they're often the only new element in too-familiar sequels. There was endless debate about the nature of Ben Kingsley's Mandarin in "Iron Man 3," huge anticipation for Benedict Cumberbatch's baddie-who-is-still-a-spoiler in "Star Trek Into Darkness," and the only thing people seem to have consistently liked about "Thor: The Dark World" was Tom Hiddleston's return as trickster god Loki. In the marketing push for the upcoming "Amazing Spider-man 2," it's all about Jamie Foxx's Electro right now. And what do we know about the next "Avengers"? Who all the new villains are and who's signed up to play them.

Fairy tales feature some of the most iconic villains in pop culture, and the fairy tale trend has been going strong for a while now in movies and television shows. Filmmakers have so far taken a variety of different approaches to bringing these stories to the big screen. We've had the fairly straightforward "Mirror, Mirror" and Kenneth Branagh's upcoming "Cinderella." There have been more adult, gritty action spectaculars like "Snow White and the Huntsman" and "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters." The recent Tim Burton "Alice in Wonderland" was technically a sequel to the Lewis Carroll original, with a grown-up Alice who must become a warrior to save Wonderland. However, many of the most successful of these films have been the ones that have taken steps to reinvent classic characters, or put their own particular twist on the familiar stories in a less drastic way, almost always putting more emphasis on the villain of the piece.

When Disney revisited "The Wizard of Oz" universe earlier this year, it decided to put the focus on the Wonderful Wizard instead of Dorothy, creating an origin story for the Wizard and the Wicked Witch resulting in "Oz, the Great and Powerful." It was an easy way to give a children's story a more adult sensibility to attract older audiences while retaining much of the whimsy and charm of the original. A "Sleeping Beauty" adaptation was always a difficult sell because the heroine is so passive, but if you put the iconic villainess in the spotlight, suddenly it becomes much more interesting for grown-ups. What's more, princesses tend to require ingenues, but you can attract an A-list star with some real clout like Angelina Jolie with a more interesting evil witch or sorceress role, "Peter Pan" is the next property lots of different studios have been circling. There are multiple projects in development right now, most of them revisionist prequels and origin stories revolving around Pan and Hook.

And why not? Villains have often been sorely neglected in other adaptations and their histories are largely uncharted territory. Disney has been particularly good at fleshing out old storybook antagonists, turning the fairly unmalicious old sea hag from "The Little Mermaid" into boisterous diva Ursula, and putting George Sanders' voice with an animated tiger for an unforgettable Shere Khan. And they're still at it. This year's newest Disney animated feature, "Frozen," will star a far more complicated, human Snow Queen than the one conceived of by Hans Christian Anderson. Good villains are one of the big advantages Disney still has over Dreamworks and other competitors. I can imagine a lot of possibilities for interesting projects similar to "Maleficent."

On the other hand, I also feel that filmmakers should proceed with caution. It would be too easy to push too far making these villains into sympathetic antiheroes and tragic figures, undercutting what made them so memorable to begin with. The "Maleficent" synopsis reveals her fairy tale origins have been entirely reworked, and there's the possibility that she may get a happy ending. Is this really what we want? Explaining the origins of the Grinch in the live action movie was a terrible mistake, and I never looked at Darth Vader quite the same way again after the "Star Wars" prequels.

Usually we like the bad guys because they're, well, bad.
---