Meaningless Villain Victory

A sub-genre of Pyrrhic Villainy where The Bad Guy Wins, yet the win is short-lived as something bad happens which renders everything they've done up to that point useless.

Examples of Meaningless Villain Victory include:

Comic Books

• Watchmen. Veidt ends the Cold War by faking an alien invasion (that kills millions of people). Everyone who learns of his plan discovers it too late to stop him. On the other hand, it's not clear if the false peace will last, and Rorschach's journal could reveal the conspiracy to the public.
• Starscream's default state in Transformers Robots in Disguise and 'Till All Are One. While he's able to mass an army of combiners to enforce his rule over Cybertron, he's painfully aware that the only people sane enough to form stable combiners are Autobots who are loyal to Optimus Prime and are only going along with Starscream's machinations because Optimus insists that they acknowledge that Starscream is the legitimately-elected leader of Cybertron. What few Decepticon combiners there are would only ever follow him in an Enemy Mine situation.

Films - Animated

• Megamind begins with him finally killing Metro Man. He then realizes that Victory Is Boring and decides to create a new hero to fight.
• Subverted in Cars. It looks like Chick Hicks winning the Piston Cup by ramming Strip "The King" Weathers off the track is this, but later media reveals that he got off scot-free. Cars 3 even shows that he had enough good credit to retire and become the angry host of a talk show.
• At the climax of Kung Fu Panda, Tai Lung gets his hands on the Dragon Scroll... and finds out that it's blank. Po outright tells him what that means, but he still can't grasp it.

Films - Live Action

• The Maltese Falcon ends with the bad guys getting their hands on the titular gilded statue that's supposed to be painted to look like lead... except it really was made of worthless lead. The bad guys don't believe this and vow to continue looking for the bird, convincing themselves that the one they got was a fake.
• The Indiana Jones films always has this. The villain always gets the MacGuffin, only for it to be revealed as an Artifact of Death that kills them.
• In The Godfather Part 2, Michael destroys his enemies but finds out that his wife Kaye had their unborn baby aborted so she won't give birth to another of his sons. With their marriage in tatters, they divorce shortly after and Michael is left alone.
• In the first Pirates of the Caribbean, Barbossa becomes human again like he wanted, but Jack Sparrow kills him shortly after.
• Star Wars:
  • Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith. He fulfilled his side of his Deal with the Devil but he lost all his limbs in the process, making him too weak to fight against Palpatine, and killed Padmé in the process, depriving him of the love of his life, and the whole reason he pulled a Face Heel Turn.
  • Emperor Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker. While he may have succeeded in wiping out the entire Skywalker and Solo clans, Palpatine himself is dead, and he took the final remnants of the Sith Order with him. The galaxy is free of him at last and his granddaughter rejects her birth name, naming herself after the Skywalker clan to ensure that their legacy of heroism goes on forever while the name of "Palpatine" falls into galactic obscurity.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Helmut Zemo in Captain America: Civil War. His breakup of the Avengers, while successful, was only temporary. In less than a decade, they're back together and saving the world once again. And even then, his schemes only caused the weaker Avengers (and the Scarlet Witch) to go rogue. Three of the biggest guns (Iron Man, War Machine and the Vision) remained as Avengers.
  • Surtur in Thor: Ragnarok. He fulfilled his goal of destroying Asgard... when it was evacuated. He killed Hela but Thor evacuated the rest of the populace to rebuild on Earth.
  • Downplayed for Mysterio in Spider-Man: No Way Home. While it was proven in seconds that his video was obviously doctored, and thus absolving Peter of any legal consequences, J. Jonah Jameson's low-information base believed the video, turning Spider-Man into a Hero with Bad Publicity.
  • Wanda Maximoff in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. She gets exactly what she wants: the Earth-838 versions of Billy and Tommy. And they freak out at how Obviously Evil she is.
• Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. While he seemingly succeeds in having Doomsday kill Superman, the Big Blue Boyscout is revealed to be Only Mostly Dead, Batman has made it so that Luthor is getting shipped off to Arkham and, after stealing Luthor's files on metahumans, Batman has begun building the Justice League.
• Miles Bron in Glass Onion. In the most technical sense of the word, he wins by destroying the evidence that credits Andi with founding Alpha. But his Klear fuel still burnt the Mona Lisa and he was the moron who put an override on the security feature to protect the painting. Even if he manages to escape blame for it - a big "if" considering that his Fair-Weather Friends have turned against him -, his reputation as a genius inventor is gone for good.

Live-Action TV

• A season 2 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has her meeting an old friend who joined a vampire cult because he was dying of a terminal disease. He gets what he wants and becomes a vampire, but she kills him as he rises from the grave.
• Game of Thrones
  • Season 6 ends like this for House Frey. Lord Walder celebrates the downfall of Houses Tully and Stark, not knowing that Sansa Stark and Jon Snow have retaken the North. Arya Stark then kills him and all the men in the family.
  • House Lannister is the master of this trope. Every time it wins, something else happens which undermines their victory and leaves them weaker than before. Not that this bothers Lord Tywin or Queen Cersei.
• In the Victorious episode "Tori Gets Stuck", Jade succeeds in forcing Tori to drop out of the play. While Jade is more than ready to take up her role as the understudy, Sikowitz decides that she's been such a gank this week that he boots her from the production entirely.
• In the Blackadder episode, "Duel and Duality", George IV dies, largely thanks to his own stupidity, leaving Blackadder free to assume his place in history and all his riches. Except Blackadder's Christmas Carol confirmed that Queen Victoria did eventually assume England's throne and that the Blackadder line is still living in obscurity. In the moment, Edmund won, but it wasn't until the year 2000 that the Blackadder lineage finally conquered England.

Western Animation

• Catra in Season 4 of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Yes, she conquered all of Etheria... but she spread her forces so thin to do so, while overworking them, that Glimmer is able to launch quick attacks to retake all the captured territory. More than that, seeing the Horde make such a push convinces Light Hope that the Heart of Etheria must be deployed.
• The Vengers in Ben 10: Omniverse. Ben steps aside and allows them to slander his image, letting them become the new heroes of Bellwood. But then the Vengers' own issues and egos tear them apart in short order. Just as Ben predicted.