What is the best and worst motivations for a super-villain in film?

I was thinking last night about the motivations super-villains in film have for why they do the things that they do.

I figure the most common is a pursuit of absolute power. It’s also probably the easiest to believe, but it is pretty one-dimensional and has been done to death. However, when done well it can be really engaging.

The revenge motivation is another common one. Usually this one has more backstory and a little more depth, but it also needs to have a reasonable balance between what happened to them and the villain’s response. If a villain gets splashed by a puddle so they decide to blow up the earth, we’d roll our eyes.

I guess there is also the just wants to be violent motivation. Another one-dimensional motivation, but easy for audiences to understand.

I think the hardest one to pull off is the noble killing motivation. The one where the villain has a somewhat believable reason for what they’re doing. You see this in Infinity War where Thanos wants to wipe out half of all species because the Universe is over-populated. This specific example is pretty cliche by this point, but I wonder if there are some better examples of a villain having a noble reason for why they are killing so many people.

Can you think of any good examples of some of the best and worst super-villain motivations?

Submitted May 18, 2019 at 10:13PM by Studly_Wonderballs http://bit.ly/2YB9gx8