10 Famous Movie Villains With Lame Motivations

4. The Joker (Batman)

Batman 1989 Jack Nicholson Joker money
Warner Bros.

The Motivation: He wanted his face on the one-dollar bill.

Part of the Joker's appeal is that his motivations are usually rather hazy, making him a scarily unpredictable force and a much more entertaining character than those villains who explain their plans in great detail.

But the Joker in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman flick - played with glee by the great Jack Nicholson - notes that he has one particular motivation for getting up to all his clowning around: he wants his face on the one-dollar bill.

At first you might think that he's just lying, or, y'know, joking, but he actually isn't doing either of those things. In the movie's final act, the character is shown chucking a load of money out onto the streets of Gotham, and while the film is hazy on the subject, the novelisation reveals that this money is indeed fake, and that each bill has his face plastered across it.

So yeah... the Joker was driven by the thought of seeing his mug printed on some money. Sure, he probably enjoyed causing all that mayhem and destruction anyway, but it does make him a little less frightening to know that he wanted to achieve something so dumb.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!