Random Movie Villains Who Suffered A Fate Worse Than Death (14 items)

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  (#1) Carmine Falcone

  • Batman Begins, DC Universe

  At the onset of Batman Begins, Carmine Falcone is living large as a member of Gotham City's underworld, but like all villains of his stature, he wants more power. After going into business with Jonathan Crane and Ra's al Ghul, he helps them move fear toxin into Gotham for Ghul's plot to destroy the city.

  After Falcone is put in jail following a tussle with the Bat, he tries to blackmail Crane and ends up getting dosed with an insane amount of fear toxin. He's left in Arkham Asylum muttering "Scarecrow" over and over. There's no way to know if the toxin will ever wear off, which means that Falcone's going to spend the foreseeable future living in terror.
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  (#2) Red Skull

  • Captain America, Captain America: The First Avenger, Marvel Universe

  After spending much of his professional career lusting after the Space Stone, Red Skull is presumed dead after being sucked through a wormhole, but his fate was much worse. Rather than perish in the vastness of space, Red Skull is brought to Vormir, where he's given the job of guarding the Soul Stone.

  When the audience catches up with Skull in Avengers: Infinity War, he's been on Vormir for 70 years and is tortured with the knowledge that he can never attain the Soul Stone because he can't love anyone other than himself. He doesn't age; he doesn't perish - he just exists alone on the planet.

  After Thanos sacrifices Gamora to gain the stone, Red Skull is finally freed from his curse. It's not clear if he dissipates into the universe or is brought back to his guardianship of the stone once Tony Stark sacrifices himself to undo Thanos's snap.
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  (#3) Helen Sharp

  • Death Becomes Her

  In Death Becomes Her, there exists a magic potion with the ability to keep its user young forever. The potion turns people into their best-looking selves, but it also creates monsters who can fall apart and perish time and time again without ever really passing on. It essentially turns its users into living, breathing members of the undead.

  Helen Sharp waffles between protagonist and antagonist in this dark comedy, but once she and her frenemy Madeline are turned onto the potion, they'll stop at nothing to remain beautiful forever - including using spray paint and epoxy to fix themselves up whenever they fall apart.

  As the film ends, both women attend the funeral of an ex who lived a happy life, and after leaving the church, they trip down its stairs and fall apart. The women are left arguing about where they parked their car as their disembodied heads roll across the sidewalk.
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  (#4) Anton Bartok

  • The Fly II

  The Fly II is a hard watch, especially if you're an animal lover. The fate of nasty corporate science villain Anton Bartok hinges on the fact that he abuses a dog that Martin, the son of Seth Brundle, makes friends with by mutating it in a duo of telepods and studying it.

  When Martin discovers what's happened to his dog, he puts the poor creature out of its misery before exacting his revenge on Bartok. Rather than just do away with Bartok, Martin goes through the telepods with him, transferring his fly DNA into Bartok and taking his normal genes. This leaves Bartok as a hideous monster, and rather than throw him in a furnace or jettison him into space, Martin locks the Bartok-creature in the same cage as the dog-monster so he can be studied.

  This isn't just revenge - it's some kind of ultra-revenge that's a little over the top. As bad as Bartok is throughout the movie, he didn't deserve to be turned into a science experiment, but he did mess with Martin's dog and that's just not something that you do to someone. 
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  (#5) Riddler

  • Batman, Batman: Under the Red Hood, Batman, Batman Forever, DC Universe

  Batman has never been known to be especially kind to his rogues' gallery, but in Batman Forever, he dishes out his most hellacious punishment to the Riddler of all people. Throughout the film, the Riddler goes out of his way to ruin the Dark Knight's life, but that's just what the villains of Gotham do (that and wear thematic outfits).

  After a fight against Riddler and Two-Face on Claw Island, Two-Face is apprehended by the authorities, but Riddler is hooked up to a giant brainwave receiver that shoves all of the knowledge of Gotham City into his frontal lobe. As he is wont to do, Batman destroys the brainwave machine, but the malfunctioning creation zaps the Riddler and turns his mind to mush.

  Following his defeat on Claw Island, Riddler is doomed to spend the rest of his life in Arkham Asylum living out the fantasy that he's Batman. Kept alive by the staff at Arkham, there's no telling how long Riddler will spend carrying on as Batman, going on adventures from the privacy of his padded cell.
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  (#6) Agent Smith

  • The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions

  Agent Smith actually gets what he wants at the end of The Matrix Revolutions. He not only defeats Neo, but he also gains the ability to become sentient. It turns out that by "winning," he actually loses big time.

  After consuming Neo and getting rid of the anomaly in the Matrix, Agent Smith realizes that he doesn't have a purpose and that now he has to be deleted along with his enemy. Smith is destroyed by his own actions, but he's still in the system, even if it's only his mind (or whatever a mind is digitally). Smith now has to spend eternity thinking about how he did himself in - or at least until the Matrix restarts again.
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  (#7) Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear

  • Toy Story 3

  Lotso is easily one of the evilest characters in cinema history, right up there with the Reverend Harry Powell and Voldemort. Not only does he create a toy prison at the Sunnyside Daycare, but he also manipulates the toys into believing they're his friends, wipes Buzz's memory and turns him into one of his henchmen, and nearly has Woody and the rest of Andy's toys incinerated.

  The toys escape their fate with the help of the claw machine aliens, and while Lotso initially avoids meeting his end in a garbage dump's flames, his fate is much worse than we'd wish on anyone. Found by a garbage man, Lotso is tied to the front of a trash truck to spend the rest of his life catching bugs and burning in the hot sun.

  It's a fate befitting a character in a Greek myth (Prometheus comes to mind), but it's the last thing audiences expect to see in a children's movie. Did he deserve this kind of thing? Or should the Pixar gods have shown mercy?
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  (#8) Jafar

  • Disney's House of Mouse, Mickey's Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse, Aladdin, The Return of Jafar, Aladdin, Aladdin, Jr.

  Jafar's hunger for power almost leads to him getting what he wants after he takes control of Aladdin's lamp. He uses his first two wishes to become sultan and the most powerful sorcerer on Earth. Those aren't bad wishes as far as power-hungry bad guys are concerned, but it's his third wish that dooms him to a fate worse than death.

  After wishing to become a genie, he's given all the powers of the universe, but he's also saddled with the one drawback of his extreme power - he has to live out eternity inside a lamp and grant three wishes to anyone who rubs it. 
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  (#9) Emily Taylor

  • Side Effects

  Emily Taylor isn't someone we'd like to know in real life, but her plan to off her husband and get away with it after claiming temporary insanity is admirable. After feigning depression, Emily is prescribed an experimental antidepressant that she claims caused her to stab her husband in her sleep.

  She's sent to a psychiatric hospital where her doctor (and the guy who prescribed her the medication) discovers that she made the whole thing up and ruined his life in the process. After getting Emily to work with him in order to put her partner behind bars, her doctor sends her back to the psychiatric facility after she refuses treatment with Thorazine and Depakote - and he's allowed to oversee her case.

  Did she kill her husband, help out in a securities fraud case, and try to ruin her doctor's life? Yes. But should she be locked up in a hellish psychiatric facility where her fate is overseen by a doctor with a grudge? No way. It's honestly chilling to think about.
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  (#10) Boba Fett

  • Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, The Dark Redemption, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars Holiday Special, Once Upon a Jedi, Star Wars

  Star Wars fans only have a few fleeting moments with Boba Fett in Empire and Return of the Jedi before he is accidentally knocked into a Sarlacc pit by a blind Han Solo, where he's painfully digested by the sand worm, allegedly for a period of “a thousand years” (though he presumably continues being digested after his life gives out.) It's an abrupt end for a character who so gripped the fandom with his cool outfit, demeanor, and ship.

  In subsequent Star Wars canon, we learn Fett actually survived his fall into the creature's stomach, and escaped in excruciating fashion. After laying unconscious in the Sarlacc's digestive tract for some period of time, he snagged a breathing apparatus from a storm trooper who'd suffered the same fate, then managed to flame-thrower his way out through the creature's belly. Even in this new “happier” timeline for the character, he still has to crawl out of the pit while covered in digestive juice, then collapses in the desert at the mercy of some Jawas. Any way you slice it, it was a miserable period of hours/days/weeks for the bounty hunter.
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  (#11) Biff Tannen

  • Back to the Future, Back to the Future Part III, Back to the Future Part II, Back to the Future

  Biff Tannen isn't a good guy by any stretch of the imagination or in any timeline, but his fate in the Back to the Future trilogy begs the existential question of whether or not it's right to "fix" the past if it's going to irreparably alter the way someone acts and thinks. This isn't to say that Biff was better as a bully in the 1950s or the 1980s, or as the despotic leader of Hill Valley in the alternate '80s, but the constant rewriting of his timeline is horrifying.

  After Marty travels to 1955, 2015, the alternate 1985, and the 19th century, he has so well trounced the Tannen line that while Biff still retains the part of himself that's abysmal to be around, he's also much more submissive to the McFly family. It's not just that his past has been so thoroughly changed that he gladly serves the McFly family as an auto detailer - it's that he doesn't even know what's happened to him.

  Biff's storyline in this landmark trilogy is nothing if not Kafkaesque. He's a man who's so deeply unlikeable that Marty McFly travels back in time and does everything he can (e.g., convincing his dad to fight Biff, crashing a truck of manure into Biff's car) to change him into a meek and dutiful member of society.
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  (#12) Jack The Ripper Gets Stuck Hurtling Through Time For Eternity In 'Time After Time'

  Jack the Ripper, or as he's known in Time After Time, "John Leslie Stevenson," is famously a bad guy both in and out of fiction. While going toe-to-toe with H.G. Wells in this classic time travel movie, Stevenson nearly escapes from 20th-century San Francisco in Wells's time machine, but there's one thing that he didn't anticipate - a much-needed part whose absence can send the driver through time and space without any way to stop.

  Wells defeats Stevenson by removing this super important part, and jettisons him into the space-time continuum with no way of stopping at any particular time or place. We're not particularly upset that Jack the Ripper is doomed to an eternity of falling through a time tunnel, but it's a bleak ending for someone who should have served time for their horrible crimes.
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  (#13) Beetlejuice

  • Beetlejuice

  By the final moments of Beetlejuice, the ghost with the most has:

  • Turned into a giant snake and tried to eat a bunch of wealthy New Yorkers
  • Crashed a toy car into an afterlife-powered brothel
  • Attempted to woo and marry a teenager
  • Gone out of his way to banish the Maitlands to limbo
  • Attempted to cut in line while in a waiting room for the recently deceased

  All of that is to say that he's not a great guy - but does he deserve the eternal indignity of sitting in a waiting room with a shrunken head forever? He shouldn't have tried to skip out on his place in line - no one likes a line-cutter - but there's something gruesome about the way he's forced to sit there with a tiny little head while waiting for his number to be called. Beetlejuice definitely needs to learn how to treat people, but there's no way he's going to learn his lesson by just stewing forever with a little peapod-sized noggin.
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  (#14) Hans Landa

  • Inglourious Basterds

  Relative to the scope of his crimes, Hans Landa gets off pretty easy. After spending years at the top of the Nazi's military engine, he's managed to curry enough favor, money, and gimmes that he can actually help the Basterds get out of Germany in one piece. He even works out a deal with the head of the OSS that nets him a full pardon and benefits after the war.

  Unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way for Landa. After arriving in Allied territory with Aldo Raine and Private Utivich, Landa's driver is shot and scalped before Raine puts Landa on his knees and carves a swastika into his head. He still ultimately survives, but after he pulls off a successful elaborate plan to betray his own country in exchange for immunity, he's still going to spend the rest of his life atoning for the sins of the Nazi Party.

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