10 Movie Villains That Were Total Fanboys

Two separate Batman movies have depicted The Riddler as a shameless Batman fanboy, albeit in starkly different ways.

In Batman Forever, Edward Nygma (Jim Carrey) is a kooky scientist working at Wayne Enterprises who idolises Bruce Wayne (Val Kilmer) and, after Bruce rejects Nygma's mind control experiment, he spends the rest of the movie psychotically plotting revenge against him.

While in the recent The Batman, the audience is led to believe that Edward Nashton (Paul Dano) has figured out the Dark Knight's (Robert Pattinson) true identity, but during their climactic confrontation at Arkham State Hospital, Nashton reveals that he's actually a Batman fan.

More to the point, his attempts to expose Gotham's corrupt underbelly were inspired by Batman's own crusade, under the impression that the two could eventually work together to clean up the city's streets.

It ties so perfectly into the film's overall thematic, that Bruce must learn to fight crime in a way that inspires not vengeance but hope, while showing him the ultimate, dangerous potential of vigilante copycats.