9 Most Insane Things Happening In Movies & TV Right Now (Jan 4th)

5. Netflix Called Thanos A "Sociopath"

Movie fans often think evil is sexy. There are whole slash fiction sites dedicated to Darth Vader, Voldemort and all many of Disney villains and Loki is pretty much the poster boy for inappropriate feelings towards malevolence. It's probably the hair. Even without the sexy feelings, there's an inherent appeal to bad folk and that's why so many film writers now add sympathy to the smelting pot when they're forging their bad guys.

There's nothing we like more, after all, than moral ambiguity and being invited to wonder whether the villain might be right. That was very much the case with Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War this year, with Thanos in the latter particularly held up as possibly not entirely wrong about saving the universe from itself. That, according to the Russos ignored the fact that he was a megalomaniac with a messiah complex who genuinely was a bad guy.

Leaning on that ambiguity a little too hard at the end of the year was Netflix, who rolled out the following description:

“Superheroes amass to stop intergalactic sociopath Thanos from acquiring a full set of Infinity Stones and wiping out half of all life in the universe.”

SOCIOPATH?! Firstly, he's definitely a lot worse than anything sociopathic. He drops his daughter off a cliff, for a start. And then there's the small fact that that stigmatises actual sociopaths and seemingly equates something actual people struggle with to the wild machinations of a giant purple murder alien.