You’ve got to take a look at the historical aspect too though. The beginning of the movie is in 1941 - early in the war, and Landa had no reason to believe that Germany wouldn’t win - they had already taken France, were marching on Moscow, etc. But by the end of the movie, D-Day has happened, and Allied armies are retaking Europe. Landa doesn’t have any particular dedication to the Nazi cause - he knows they’re going to lose soon, and he’s willing to cut whatever deal he can to make it easy on himself.
Most recently, I remember most of the theater cheered at the demise of Bellatrix Lestrange.
Not so much his death - which is quick - but Andrew Robinson’s memorably nasty Scorpio in Dirty Harry is shot in the leg and tortured by Harry, and I imagine that audiences at the time wanted Harry to torture him harder. To egg him on and really beat the crap out of him. Albeit that ultimately it doesn’t work; from what I remember they’re too late to do any good, and it’s counterproductive because Scorpio gets let off.
There’s a similar scene in The Dark Knight, where Batman comes close to killing one of the Joker’s goons - until it turns out that the man is mentally ill, incapable of answering. Again, I surmise that the audience would have been willing Batman on; and of course there’s the sequence where Batman assaults the Joker himself in a police cell.
Off the top of my head Cobra ends with the villain being beaten and then set on fire - while celebrating his birthday! - and we’re supposed to take great pleasure from this. Mad Max ends with the villain dying offscreen although it’s a pretty sadistic and cold-blooded murder. Unlike the aforementioned it’s not really presented as a feelgood triumph, either.
“GET OFF MY PLANE!” from Air Force One.
The helicopter falling on John Lithgow in Cliffhanger.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? – dissolved by inches
Jurassic Park – (velociraptors) crunched & thrown by T-Rex (who survives, raar)
Hellboy 2 – bad guy gets eaten by a mechanical shredder in the Troll market
He’s not a classic villain, but he is a lawyer. He and Nedry were there to take the onus off of John Hammond (Attenborough) who was the real villaiin of the story.
Nedry behaves pretty much the same in both book and movie. Movie-Gennaro is a composite of book-Gennaro and Ed Regis–the latter absent from the film and dino-chow in the book. And I’m not sure how much he takes the burden of guilt off Hammond, who is less malicious than foolishly arrogant anyway. But then, with the possible exception of the engineer whose name I just forgot – Mr. Arnold – everyone directly involved with the planning of the park was guilty of hubris. That wouldn’t include Gennaro, who knew little more of Hammond’s plans than the paleontologists did. Gennaro’s sin was cowardice, not arrogance; his mistake was not listening to Alan Grant. But his panic was understandable too.
and, by the end of the book, dead, as opposed to the relatively happy ending in the movie.
That’s what I came in here to post. The audience went ape-shit, even though I’m sure half of them knew it was coming.
My overall point was that Gennaro was not directly involved in the planning, design, or maintenance of the park. He was as surprised as Grant, Satler, & Malcolm to see the actual dinosaurs there. Grant & Satler were probably more indirectly involved in the park’s planning than Gennaro was; both contributed information when asked, though they didn’t know what that information was for. I’m not sure of Malcolm’s pre-visit knowledge, though he certainly believed almost from the beginning of his time there that the enterprise was inherently unworkable.
And as I think on it, what Gennaro did know had him dismayed. Hammond remarks that he brought Grant, Satler,& Malcolm to the park to help him win the dispute with the bloodthirsty lawyer, and thus was surprised when all three scientists were against what he was doing when they saw the scale.
I haven’t seen the remake, but the Bronson version of The Mechanic ends with a bang.
Don’t forget Auric Goldfinger getting sucked out the window of a Lear Jet!
And everyone cheers when the Wicked Witch of the West gets melted.
In the 1980 film Flash Gordon the evil emperor Ming the Merciless is speared in the back by the needlenose of a spaceship being flown by the hero Flash. It goes right through his chest, and we get to see that the emperor is, quite literally, blue-blooded. I saw it in the theater back then and there was a cheer from the audience.
At the end of that film.
big boss:“You’re fired!”
robocop: “Thank you” shoots bad guy.
There’s a little known women in prison flick starring Erik Estrada where the bad guys totally get their comeuppance, called “Caged Fury” where a considerable portion of the end of the film is devoted to the hero rampaging through a bogus prison for women (it’s actually a white slave training facility) beating the hell out of every last guard in the place. As the guards have been beating, bullying, raping and sometimes killing the women kept there, it’s very pleasurable to watch. The guards rarely last long against the hero, who’s a gorilla-like martial arts expert (played by Richie Barathy), but there are a LOT of them and it’s great fun to see them punched, kicked, thrown, and on several occasions, kicked right through walls by the hero. In fact, this lengthy rampage is the most memorable thing about Caged Fury, which is an otherwise forgettable exploitation women in prison flick. Well, there is the scene where Barathy and Erik Estrada rescue two babes from a biker gang in a parking lot by beating up the entire gang, THEN drag a couple of the bikers into the bar so they can have an excuse to beat up the rest of the gang. Perfect MST3K fodder really. But definitely an example of the bad guys getting theirs while the audience cheers.
Or the rapist that gets shot in the nuts. That got some cheers from the audience when I saw it in the theater.
In the Bounty Hunter when Rutger Hauer took the pin out of the grenade in Gene Simmons’s mouth, and walked away, saying “Screw the bonus.” Quite a few cheers on the mess deck.
Dredd
The main villain(Mama) gets pushed off the top of a very high building and then falls in slo-mo. The camera is situated under the ground, so we see her face smush into a bloody goo.
Let’s just say she deserved it.
The audience I saw The Godfather III with roundly celebrated when Sofia Coppola’s character snuffed it.
She might not have been the villain in the story, but she sure was the villain to the audience.