Engulf & Devour, SILENT MOVIE (1976)
Mel Brooks's generically titled comedy stars Brooks as a movie director who plans to save the troubled Big Picture Studio with a star-studded silent picture. This makes him the target of Engulf & Devour, the monstrous corporation (whose motto is "Our Hands Are In Everything") planning to gobble up the studio. Their methods of sabotaging the film's success range from sending Bernadette Peters to vamp the director, a former drunk, and knock him off the wagon, to stealing the picture itself before its grand premiere. Weirdly, all this is said to have been partly inspired by the actual takeover of Paramount Pictures by Gulf & Western, which was probably a lot noisier.
Union Broadcasting System (UBS), NETWORK (1976)
In screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's attack on television, new anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is saved from cancellation and becomes a major star — "the mad prophet of the airwaves" — after he reacts to news of his firing by flipping out and promising to kill himself on the air, a spectacle that the mass audience finds entertaining. With Beale's ratings on the rise, the head of the entertainment division (Faye Dunaway) takes over the news department, a speculative joke that some thought came to fruition one year later when the ABC news division was handed to sports-broadcast head Roone Arledge. Unfortunately, Beale's diatribes against the loss of individuality and free will are regarded by Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), the head of the company that owns the network, as a threat to corporate power, so he summons the prodigal newsman to his office for a lecture on "the primal forces of nature." ("There is no America; there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.") Beale is so impressed with this wisdom that he agrees to "preach" Jensen's philosophy to the television audience, which finds it so demoralizing that they tune out in droves, which leads to Beale's on-camera assassination. In the years since Network came out it has become customary to salute Chayefesky for having been clairvoyant, though it's hard to think of an easier way of predicting the future accurately than guessing that TV is always going to keep getting worse.
The Phone Company, THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)
At one point in this spy spoof, a globe-trotting KGB agent observes that no matter where he goes, everyone he meets there hates the phone company. It turns out they have good reason. In a movie that features assassins of many lands picking each other off while trying to kill or kidnap the title character (James Coburn), the ultimate force of evil revealed at the climax is The Phone Company, whose android spokeman (William Redfield) unveils a diabolical plan to force all Americans to have a call-receiving device implanted in their heads. Of all the evil corporations in movie history, this one is almost certainly the funniest, though it must be conceded that the movie's depiction of the phone company as a sinister, monolithic force is dated in certain ways. For one thing, it turns out that most Americans today would probably be happy to sign up to have a chip put in their heads if it enabled them to download free movie trailers and video clips.
OMNI Consumer Products, ROBOCOP (1987)
Screenwriter Edward Neumeier was reportedly inspired to pen the script to Paul Verhoeven’s classic cyberpunk satire of American capitalism run amok after spending time on the set of Blade Runner. Like the Tyrell Corporation, OCP is a monolithic enterprise that virtually controls the police, and likewise has a run of bad luck with a series of robotic creations that do their jobs a bit too well. (If only Tyrell had the good sense to hire Miguel Ferrer.) Back in 1987, Omni Consumer Products’ stated intention to fully privatize organizations that had previously been thought of as the purview of government — "hospitals, prisons, space exploration. . . we practically are the military," says CEO Ronny Cox — seemed like absurdist comedy at best. Now, in the era of privately-run prisons, for-profit hospitals, billionaires in space, and Blackwater, the joke’s not quite so funny anymore.
Cyberdyne Systems, TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)
Most of the companies covered in this week’s list are up to no good — a little profiteering here, some inside trading there, maybe even endangering a few people’s health to turn a profit. But only Cyberdyne Systems, a second-tier Silicon Valley B2B manufacturer, brings about the destruction of the entire human race. Through convoluted events of the sort that only take place in movies involving time travel, Cyberdyne is responsible for the development of SkyNet, the nuclear defense computer network that eventually becomes self-aware and decides that we humans are too troublesome for our own good. From then on, it’s nuclear holocausts, killer robots, and grim, inevitable doomsday for everybody. We’re pretty sure that, despite their cunning manipulation of the situation and determination to put profit over safety, this isn’t the way that Cyberdyne’s managers would have wanted things to turn out; a global atomic extinction can’t have done much for their stock value.
The Tyrell Corporation, BLADE RUNNER (1982)
The very model of the 'megacorp' that constituted the primary villains in the cyberpunk fiction Blade Runner helped create, the Tyrell Corporation’s gigantic, pyramid-shaped arcology looms over a ruined polyglot Los Angeles. While the ‘little people’ are sold a steady diet of drugs, sex, cheap food and promises of off-world salvation, Tyrell (and its founder, the oleaginous Eldon Tyrell, brilliantly portrayed by Joe Turkel) controls the police, using them as hired goons to hunt down rogue replicants. These artificial life forms were created by the brilliant and unscrupulous Tyrell to serve as soldiers, sex slaves and workers in highly dangerous conditions, but he designed them too well; some achieved self-awareness and sought to eliminate the built-in expiration date that kept them from becoming too human. Tyrell’s desire to create the perfect being and then destroy them shapes this brilliant film's central conflict.
— Paul Clark, Pazit Cahlon, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov, Bryan Whitefield