20 Recent Movie Villains Who Were Instantly Iconic

5. SolidGoldMagiKarp - Eddington

Ari Aster's deeply deranged satirical thriller Eddington is about many, many things, but perhaps its most salient point is that the film's characters waste so much oxygen screaming at one another that Big Data is able to rather quietly expand its dangerous reach in the background.

One of the film's central conflicts revolves around the planned construction of a data center in the titular New Mexico town at the behest of data firm SolidGoldMagiKarp.

This is all while the residents of Eddington become increasingly, violently divided, driven by what they purport to see on social media. 

This is an outcome exacerbated by the data firm themselves sending a private jet's worth of mercenaries to the town to cause further chaos.

The mayhem creates enough of a distraction that the data center is ultimately built by film's end, the implication being that Big Data is now basically unstoppable as it expands its influence, presumably with the proliferation of AI.

With the world at a serious inflection point as AI seeps into so many aspects of daily life, there was perhaps no more timely movie villain last year than SolidGoldMagiKarp.