Because a few movies did "tragic villain" decently, audiences liked the switch-up, and the talentless hacks took it to mean that ever villain has to be "complex".

self-interested megalomaniacs

So billionaires?

The villain is the protagonist in most superhero movies, the superheroes are generally the ones maintaining a vague status quo in the antagonist role

Nolan's batman movies did really well and they had more "grounded" villains (well, so long as you ignore scarecrow, ras al ghul, bane, talia al ghul...), so this one tried to follow the same trend. It also apparently brought in Nolan's tory politics and utter contempt for the poor. Remember when Bane stages a people's revolution in Gotham only to then decide he's going to nuke the city for no reason?

I was gonna say that they did make Lex Luthor a billionaire tech-bro asshole in the Superman movie, but then I also remembered that his opposition to Superman was out of a commitment to a bizarre interpretation of reddit-atheism, and didn't have anything to do with competing visions of the social good.

To some modern treat enjoyers, having villains actually just be willingly evil assholes would be "cookie cutter" and make the story seem "one dimensional."

The Bane treatment.

Or the Marco Inaros Faction in The Expanse, or Magneto in the old X-Men movies, and so on and so on. It's basically mandatory to have antogonists with a relatable agenda commit acts of cartoonish evil out of nowhere to make it clear that the only answer to injustice is incrementalist fuckery in aliance with macchiavellian ruling class ghouls.

Wot if yer dog woz a computah

in what way was Paul Dano's Riddler an incel?

In the newer comics gotham is literally cursed. Arkham basement has a portal to hell, a warlock sleeping under there for thoussnds of years cursing the land. Comics have the funniest ways of explaining why people with technology and power that makes them functionally gods would choose to keep the status quo that produces insane criminals. Just say you wanna sell books bruh its alright

The exact opposite of this is Arkham Origins

the final scene would be the US army dropping a nuke on Gotham

I wanna go the opposite direction. All the villains are billionaires now as well, replace Alfred with a Marx to new!Batman's Engels, have Bruce quote lines from Marxist texts while he beats up the Joker for crimes against the Proletariat.

Really good article. Reminds me of this banger:

Morgana’s ethical awakening, her rejection of the system from which she has previously benefitted, and her identification with the oppressed, is specifically shown to stem from empathy and moral outrage at injustice… and yet, somehow, without any rhyme or reason, when she finally departs Camelot and openly goes over to the other side, she becomes a sadistic psychopath with no regard for the suffering of the innocent, acting from motives of thwarted ambition, petty jealousy and irrational vindictiveness. Her political awakening comes from compassion and simultaneously nullifies that compassion. It couldn’t be clearer: political outrage, no matter how well intentioned, instantly becomes dangerous the moment it steps beyond the boundaries of the state, of the mainstream, of the legal, of reformism, of consensus political normality.

Common Redsails W

In the Snyder extended cut, he beefs with Baby Gronk via an exchange of diss tracks