Most-Shared Movie Villain Online is a Disney Lion, Judging by GIFs
Counting up the number of animations depicting film bad guys is a hard job, but someone had to do it. Joker, Vader, and Lecter are going to be jealous.
One of the most fun things in movies is a truly awful, love-to-hate-them villain. But how would one use technology to determine the best villain of all?
The folks at Go.Frontier, an authorized reseller for Frontier Communications, set about to do exactly that in a very simple way. First, they narrowed down a list of the 25 best/worst baddies. Then, with help from GIF-maker Tenor, they counted all the animated GIFs featuring those bad guys at Giphy.com, the top online repository of shareable GIFs (AKA the primary mode of modern communication. Sorry, words). They published the results in a full report.
The top seven above are a little surprising-seriously, Scar?-considering the plethora of badness that exists. You’d expect Darth Vader, who was in more than one movie (not counting remakes), to at least make the top 10. But Anakin’s at number 18, with only 1,246 GIFs to show for the power of the dark side. (His boss, Ol’ Sheev “Darth Sidious” Palpatine, comes in even lower, at number 23.)
Still, it’s nice to see the only female to even make the top 25 in this list is up there in the top seven. Kudos to Margaret Hamilton, still a legend. (Surely Harley Quinn and Maleficent also feel left out, as do these ladies.)
Also interesting is Go.Frontier’s infographic, below, on the peak usage of villain GIFs. They were able to determine the specific days when certain bad guys were on top of the search terms, going back to February 2019. No shock to see the Wicket Witch of the West (above) was big on Halloween, as was Michael Myers, since he literally stars in the franchise of the same name. Also interesting to see the villains with the masks that would best protect them from COVID-19 peaked at the start of the pandemic. Vader spiked on Star Wars Day (May 4). And Hans Gruber, villain of obvious Christmas movie Die Hard, ascended on Christmas Eve.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com.
