8 Movie Villains Created Out Of Spite
5. Antwan (Free Guy)
Taika Waititi's bonkers performance in Free Guy was a highlight in a very funny movie, with his character - Antwan, the head of a video game company - clearly being designed to poke fun at money-grubbing studio executives who are allergic to originality.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this type of executive was something that director/producer Shawn Levy was all-too familiar with, having spent the last couple of decades working under major studios like Disney, Fox, and Netflix.
In other words, Levy has experienced studio higher-ups who are disdainful of original ideas, but rather than bottling these frustrations up, he decided to channel them into the creation of Antwan, with the filmmaker revealing that Free Guy's villain was largely inspired by an unnamed studio executive who had annoyed him in the past:
"I just thought it was funny, because early on, an executive, who I won't name, said, 'Okay, so this movie Free Guy, what's it based on?' And we were like, 'Nothing.' And the executive is like, 'Okay, you say nothing, but like, so it's not a sequel. Is it based on a comic book, graphic novel? What?' Like, 'No, no, nothing. New ideas.' Like, 'So it's a movie based on nothing?' I'm like, 'Yeah. Based on creative originality.' And it was like such a foreign concept to this suit, that I wrote most of that as dialogue for Taika Waititi."
It's sad to think that these types of conversations are actually taking place within the industry, but on the plus side, we did get a hilarious character out of it!