This month's Wired magazine features a tiny little blurb/rant about how the quality of a superhero movie is inversely proportional to the number of bad guys in said movie.
The writer's point is that the more villains included in a movie, the more it sucks.
He makes a good argument in his ten sentence article, but is it all together accurate? Immediately several movies come to mind... so what I did was try to see if this formula really does hold water. Using
Rotten Tomatoes as a standard, I compared their approval ratings to the number of villains in the films below:
• Batman - 1 villain, 71%
• Batman Forever - 2 villains, 43%
• Batman & Robin - 3 villains, 13%
• X-Men - 4 villains, 81%
• X2 - 3 villains, 88%
• X-Men: Last Stand - 5+ villains, 57%
• Iron Man - 1 villain, 94%
• Iron Man 2 - 2 villains, 74%
• Spider-man - 1 villain, 89%
• Spider-man 2 - 1 villain, 93%
• Spider-man 3 - 3 villains, 63%
It's particularly interesting when you look at films in a franchise and how it changes. Now, of course, there are a few exceptions (Superman II, Dark Knight) but generally it seems that the more villains, the worse the film. Obviously there are things that TRULY determine the quality of the film, such as the director, the script, the cast. It is pretty interesting to see how the villain ratio works for/against a film as well.
So what does that mean for films like
Green Lantern with both Sinestro and Hammond as villains? We shall see...