The perfect movie villain

Hi folks, it’s Brad in San Francisco. Tom Cruise battles Hollywood’s greatest fears about artificial intelligence in the new Mission: Imposs [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hi folks, it’s Brad in San Francisco. Tom Cruise battles Hollywood’s greatest fears about artificial intelligence in the new Mission: Impossible. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Dutch chip rules [seek to further squeeze China]( • AT&T’s stock [fell to a 29-year low]( • The Philippines cracked down on [China-centric online casinos]( The Entity Aside from striking actors and writers, stagnant box office sales and the wobbly economics of streaming, Hollywood is also facing a dire creative crisis: the lack of credible bad guys in big budget movies. Screenwriters have been hemmed in. Cultural sensitivities discourage the use of ethnically identifiable bad guys; then there are the demands of opening a film around the world, even in adversarial countries that might have provided the antagonists of yesteryear. That seems to be why most big baddies these days are either recycled from previous films (the Nazis in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), megalomaniacal multiversal versions of the good guy (The Flash, Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse) or — most tiresome — aliens bent on global destruction (pretty much every other movie). In the most absurd attempt around this quandary, Tom Cruise’s last film, Top Gun: Maverick, declined to even identify its adversary. Enemy pilots simply kept their visors down and apparently stripped their jet fighters of all flags and emblems. But — mild spoiler alert here — Cruise’s newest movie, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, which opened last week, finally has a satisfying answer. The baddie is an out-of-control artificial intelligence called the Entity, which started as a cyberweapon of US intelligence, gorged itself on social media and online news, became sentient and hacked the world’s computers. In the film, if I followed the convoluted exposition between entertaining action scenes, governments are treating this out-of-control AI like a superweapon and competing to capture it, in part because “whoever owns the Entity, owns the truth,” as one character gamely states. In turn, the AI defends itself: erasing faces on live video streams, creating deep fakes of voices to throw pursuers off the trail and manipulating human proxies into doing things like smuggling bombs onto airplanes and bridges. Aside from these far-fetched schemes, the movie riffs on Silicon Valley’s stated fears about AI. Elon Musk has called for more safety protocols around AI development and [last week announced]( the formation of a new company, xAI, to pursue “the best possible future for humanity.” OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman recently travelled the world, evangelizing for government oversight. Meanwhile, an alarmist fringe called AI doomers, including the prominent figure interviewed in [the latest episode of our video series, AI: IRL](, believe we have very little time to stop the technology before a rogue chatbot wipes us all out. It’s unclear whether he has factored Ethan Hunt’s heroics into this warning. Finding villainy in futuristic technology is nothing new, of course. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis had evil robots mingling with underground workers all the way back in 1927. HAL-9000 went haywire and locked an astronaut out of their spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Androids and their inhumane corporate overlords factored into all the Aliens movies. And so on. But those iconic films pulled their rogues from a gallery of futuristic sci-fi ideas. Their malevolent tech creations weren’t literal predictions as much as symbols of human greed and ambition run amuck. [The Entity]( in the latest Mission Impossible is something else — a representative of very topical fears. It feels like a realistic danger that may not be that far off considering the dizzying pace of innovation in places like Silicon Valley and China and the lack of any obvious ways to slow down or regulate it. In other words, it may be GPT-11. There’s an irony here, too. In their negotiations with movie studios, writers and actors have raised concerns about AI taking their jobs and limiting their income by authoring screenplays and imitating their visual likeness on screen. Aliens, Nazis and killer robots never menaced Hollywood like AI is doing now. So, write what you know, I guess. The new Mission: Impossible either presciently or coincidentally captures this remarkable confluence between reality and fiction. But there’s one place where it comes up short. In the film, it’s not entirely clear what the Entity is after — if there’s a devious plan behind its machinations. And that’s really the most challenging part of crafting a good villain. Is the bad guy’s plan believable, and are the stakes sufficiently high? In next summer’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two, maybe we’ll learn that this rogue AI has some hidden agenda to subjugate humans and that only Tom Cruise can save us. Or, paraphrasing from the only summer movie in recent memory to leave us with a truly iconic antagonist, perhaps the Entity just wants to watch the world burn. —[Brad Stone](mailto:bstone12@bloomberg.net) The big story A wealthy New York City enclave is fighting against what residents call “ugly” 5G towers. Similar tensions are [likely to be repeated across the country](. One to watch [Watch the Bloomberg Technology TV interview]( with Maureen Ohlhausen, a former acting chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission. Get fully charged China’s top-performing mutual fund is betting on [AI stocks for a recovery](. Chipmakers Western Digital and Japan’s Kioxia expect to come to a merger agreement by August, [concluding months of talks](. General Atlantic and Goldman Sachs are among a group of investors that [bid $1.7 billion for Kahoot](, a Norwegian educational-tech company. Turkey’s top court upheld a law tightening regulation on e-commerce companies, [a blow to the country’s leading online retailer](, which is backed by Alibaba. 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