10 Movies Where The Hero Became The Villain | ScreenRant
Some of the biggest movie twists feature a hero turning bad and becoming the villain at the end, and these films did it better than any other.
One of the biggest twists in movies comes when the hero that has led the story ends up turning into the villain by the end. This can happen in several different ways. The hero could start off as a good guy and then gradually become a villain throughout the story. There are also times where the hero was always a villain and hid it during the movie.
The movies can also include heroes who didn't even know they were a villain until the moment the revelation occurred and learned their fate the same time the audience did. These movies mostly have to play it fair with the audience or they will turn on it in the end, but the ones who do it right become instant rewatchable classics.
10 Fight Club (1999) - Available To Stream on Prime Video
David Fincher's Fight Club is a movie where neither the audience nor the hero knows that he is really the villain of the story. In the film, Edward Norton plays The Narrator, who tells the story of his life, which includes meeting the charismatic Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt.
The two start an underground fight club where the men in the community relieve their toxic masculinity in brutal fistfights with each other. However, Tyler Durden also has plans to bring down the capitalistic society with a terroristic act. In the end, The Narrator learns he is actually Tyler and hallucinated his alter-ego the entire movie.
9 Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith - Available To Stream On Disney+
Everyone knew that the hero of the Star Wars prequels would one day become a villain. Anakin Skywalker joined the Jedi Order as a child and ended up training under Obi-Wan Kenobi. The two fought evil and worked together for the first two movies and fans waited for the turn to come.
In Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, Anakin finally fell to the Dark Force. He killed several young Jedi students, going completely evil. He ended up fighting Obi-Wan and was beaten badly, but eventually got saved and changed into the powerful Sith Lord, Darth Vader.
8 The Godfather (1972) - Available To Stream On Peacock+
All of The Godfather was about a good man's fall to evil. When the movie started, Michael Corleone was a good man, who just served in World War II, where he served in the Marine Corps and fought in the Pacific and European Theaters. He ended up honorably discharged following injury with a Silver Star and Navy Cross.
However, his father was Don Vito Corleone, the most powerful mafia leader in New York City. When his brother dies in an ambush and his father dies following a heart attack, Michael realizes he will never achieve his dreams of living outside his father's empire and takes over as the Godfather, becoming more ruthless than even his own father.
7 Memento (2000) - Available To Stream On Tubi
Christopher Nolan's movie Memento was a puzzle movie that did something unique, helping it stand out from other detective movies. The entire story played out in reverse order, with the last scene of the movie first and then working backward through scenes until the first scene plays at the end.
Leonard Shelby had anterograde amnesia where he could no longer store new memories. He knows that his wife was murdered but he doesn't know who killed her and wants to find the killer. He learns of a suspect named Teddy and decides he is the killer. By the end of Memento, viewers learned that he already found his wife's killer a year earlier and has been killing random people for someone ever since.
6 The Dark Knight (2008) - Available To Stream On Hulu
In The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan created what is considered the best of his Batman trilogy and presented a hero that was an even better person than Batman himself. This was Harvey Dent, the district attorney who Bruce Wayne believed could clean up Gotham City in a way that Batman never could.
Sadly, Joker ruined that with an attack where Harvey's girlfriend died and he ended up with half his face burned off, becoming a villain that Batman had to stop in the end.
5 Carrie (1976) - Available To Stream On Fubo
Carrie is based on Stephen King's debut novel about a young girl who suffers from intense bullying both at school and at home. Carrie White was a teenage girl whose mother considered her impure and punishment for her own sins as a girl. As a result, she pushes religious torture onto her daughter, turning her into an outcast at school.
When some bullies pull a prank on Carrie at school, she develops telekinetic powers and begins killing everyone, from the bullies to a teacher who was kind to her.
4 X-Men: First Class (2011) - Available To Stream On Fubo
Ever since the first X-Men movie, Magneto was a complex villain garnering a level of sympathy. He was a survivor of the Holocaust, a young child whose parents died there and left him with intense hatred and distrust of humans, especially when dealing with prejudice.
In the X-Men prequel movie X-Men: First Class, Magneto was a younger man and his hatred had not reached the apex that it did in the first trilogy. However, after helping Professor X and the X-Men stop the Cuban Missile Crisis, Magneto gave in to his anger, killed Sebastian Shaw for his war crimes, and then destroyed Professor X's ability to walk.
3 Terminator: Genisys (2015) - Available To Stream On FX Now
Through most of the Terminator franchise, the one man who was responsible for saving the world from destruction was John Connor. In the first movie, he sent back a soldier to stop the first Terminator from killing his mother. In the second and third, it was about keeping himself safe as a child.
Things changed in Terminator: Genisys. This movie took the idea that time travel could change things for the wrong in the future and turned John Connor, the freedom fighter, into a villain when Skynet attacked him and changed him into a new Terminator.
2 Shutter Island (2010) - Available To Stream On Netflix
Martin Scorsese directed a genre movie called Shutter Island, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. This is one of Scorsese's only horror movies and is a psychological thriller starring Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio as Chuck and Teddy, two detectives sent to a psychiatric hospital to investigate a mysterious disappearance.
However, not everything is as it seems. By the end, the truth reveals that Chuck is trying to help Teddy remember his tragic past. There was no disappearance and Teddy is a patient who murdered his wife after she drowned their children.
1 Watchmen (2009) - Available To Stream On HBO Max
Based on the Alan Moore graphic novel, Watchmen tells the story of an alternate Earth where superheroes have been banned and the United States won the Vietnam War and lived in mostly world peace. Directed by Zack Snyder, the movie told mostly the same story, which saw a ticking Doomsday clock that could lead to the end of the world.
When someone kills a former superhero, one of his former teammates starts investigating the case. However, in the end, it was another former superhero, Ozymandius, who turned out to be the villain, setting up the opening murder and then killing millions of people to force the world to work together to stop the Doomsday clock.