The Marvel movies are beloved the world over, and they are consistent box office and critical hits. Be aware there are spoilers discussed. So while Kursed and Crossbones are in the MCU, it's unfair to compare their character-lite screentime with other major villains, and thus they've been left off the list. At the time, Rourke was in the midst of what would ultimately be an incredibly brief resurgence thanks to his terrific performance in The Wrestler.
But when he showed up for Iron Man 2 , he basically wore his same clothes off the street, demanded the character have a pet bird, and mumbled his way through the film. That extends to its main villain Emil Blonsky Tim Roth , who in the film is basically just portrayed as a macho military dude who wants to get Hulk-sized ripped. He becomes Abomination because reasons, fights Hulk, and is beaten to a pulp. The end. He really only exists in the film to justify a big third act fist fight between Hulk and a formidable challenger, and as a character is as paper thin as they come.
Malekith is a mean Dark Elf who wants to rule the universe. He ranks low on this list by design. While Taskmaster is a fairly solid physical antagonist for Natasha Romanoff in Black Widow , the character's true identity is a twist you see coming a mile away, and even then we get very little payoff or resolution to who's really under the mask.
So in the end, Taskmaster serves as a secondary villain in the film, purely there to drive action sequences. Taskmaster is fine. He has no superpowers or plans to gain superpowers. It's a little unfair to even include Ghost on this list, because Hannah John-Kamen 's character is more of an antagonist than a true villain. But she is indeed the main "baddie" of Ant-Man and the Wasp , and while she gets some refreshing moral complexity, it still feels a bit like John-Kamen's talents were underutilized here.
The Midnight Run approach to the story dictates that there are various obstacles in our heroes' way, and so while Ghost is the most formidable, there are times when she takes a backseat to Walton Goggins ' shady dealings or the federal authorities.
When we get to the Ghost "twist" it provides some understanding for her character, and we see she's really not all that "bad", but the film doesn't spend enough time on Ghost to fully develop her as a scary or threatening force. So when it comes time for the big third act battle, Ghost is, again, more of an annoying obstacle than a serious threat to the well-being of our heroes. Ghost is, much like Ant-Man and the Wasp , just fine. Speaking of forgettable villains, enter Darren Cross. Well, we can give much of the credit to James Spader's great motion capture performance.
There's humor, there's menace; it's just the most engaging and best thing about this movie, by and large. Now we're getting into the real heavy hitters. Bridges is a perfectly charming surrogate father type for much of the movie, but you don't cast Jeff Bridges to do just that; his heel turn and reveal as orchestrator of Stark's kidnapping propel the movie into top-gear, and he has a great showdown in the movie's third act.
The biggest mistake with Stane? Not keeping him alive to show up agains in future MCU installments. Somehow, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. He comes with that usual Kurt Russell cool guy charm, but is, of course, hiding a casual sinisterness beneath the surface.
The character of Ego is such a huge upgrade in the villain department that it makes Guardians 2, to me, a bit more enjoyable than he original along with Michael Rooker's great performance. While it didn't quite work to perfection for some of the entries lower on our list, sometimes the key to making an awesome MCU villain is as simple as casting an awesome actor.
That's never been more the case than in Spider-Man: Far From Home, where Jake Gyllenhaal plays a multi-faceted character—and master of illusions—with different energies throughout the film. If you're a little skeptical of Mysterio at first, well, that makes sense because his corny sincerity eventually makes way for a completely untethered madness. Gyllenhaal has been fantastic in recent years at playing manic weirdo characters in movies like Nightcrawler and Velvet Buzzsaw, and he really, really goes for it in Spider-Man: Far From Home.
And, hell, it really works. The fact that Michael B. Jordan is hardly in the first act of Black Panther is a testament to how good this character is. Not only does he show up in that museum early on looking very cool in the denim jacket with glasses on, but he represents the best kind of MCU villain: the one who kind of has a point.
Killmonger is a trained weapon as a former member of the U. And his stance leads to a world-changing decision at the end of the movie. The one mistake comes at the close of his character's arc; we could've used some more Killmonger in future movies or shows. Wenwu will likely only appear in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, but is a top-notch villain by any stretch of the imagination, in large part due to the performance of international film royalty Tony Leung.
This is a character who can be scary; this is a character who can be warm. But the key to this villain's greatness? At no point do we question his motivations. We understand, at just about every moment of the film, why he's doing what he's doing.
Sure, sometimes—like Shang-Chi himself—we may find ourselves yelling at the screen wishing he would just understand what's going on, or do something differently. But he's set in his ways, and steadfast about that. This is one of the MCU's greatest creations, a villain who has you leaving the theater asking a simple question: was he ever a villain in the first place? Zemo is a remarkable character. He's not a robot. He's not an alien.
He's not even a super soldier. He's, basically, just a guy—a motivated, master planner of a guy. Zemo has, other than maybe arguably Thanos, the best plan of any villain in any MCU movie—and that's why he succeeds.
His greatest ability, really, is self-awareness; he knows he alone can't hurt the Avengrers, but that they can hurt one another. We're not considering his appearance in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier too much here as promised , but that does go to show the value in keeping a strong villain alive and active in the sandbox.
Here's hoping for more Zemo in the future. More than any other franchise, Spider-Man —every version, including the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield films—always has a feeling that feels sort of smaller and warm, despite being a major blockbuster. A big part of that probably comes down to what's become a Spider-Man movie tradition: a villain who has an almost oddly-close feeling and relationship to our hero.
Tobey Maguire's biggest enemies were his best friend's father and his professional mentor, and Tom Holland finds a similar close foe in Adrian Toomes as the Vulture we'll spare the specifics on the off-chance you haven't seen it yet. But for just a moment let's talk about the Keaton of it all.
On top of just being a great actor in a great performance—he kind of provides a blue collar, working class look at how some people in the MCU can be affected, and adapt, after the Avengers save the world and leave rubble behind—his narrative entering this movie is such a great one. Consider Keaton's "origin," of sorts, in this genre: he played Batman in the late '80s and early '90s.
Then he did other things for quite a while, before starring in Birdman, where he should have won the Oscar for playing an actor best known for a superhero role hmmm It's a lot, and, frankly, it's great stuff. Toomes will likely appear again all over the place; he was in the trailer for the Sony Morbius movie, so that's opening up an entire can of worms that we don't even know where to start with over there.
You know what's great? When something is teased for a long-ass time and winds up fully delivering. Marvel fans were teased since at the prospect of the heroes getting the universe's biggest threat yet in Thanos, and through teases here in Guardians of the Galaxy and there in Avengers: Age of Ultron effectively built up the idea of just how powerful and threatening this guy was. And thanks to some wonderful acti0n sequences, raising the stakes, and a surprisingly understated performance from Josh Brolin, Thanos proved to be the villain everyone expected him to be.
Surely Marvel will try this strategy again—propping a major "big bad" up for a number of years, over the course of many projects—but it'll be hard to execute anyone as well as they executed Thanos. Who else? While one could certainly make the argument that Loki veered closer to anti-hero and away from villain in his latter appearances in Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War, and, presumably, the upcoming Loki , uh, we're not going to make that argument.
This is a villain who's so wonderful, joyful, and, as Paul Bettany puts it , "delicious," in his scheming, that even in all his villainy—and he is really so evil—that we cannot help but love him. This man killed Coulson! He almost killed a random old guy standing up to him! And yet Perhaps even more than the character himself, we are commending the excellence and consistency with which Tom Hiddleston plays him.
In fact, with the power of the Gauntlet at his command, Thanos went on a killing spree that claimed the lives of almost half the sentient beings in the universe, including the X-Men, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four. When the Avengers opposed him, Thanos easily killed all of them, including a defiant Captain America. It was only when his hubris leads him to leave his physical form that his own granddaughter, Nebula, was able to seize the Infinity Gauntlet, and undo all of his destruction.
Thanos has been a constant thorn in the side of the Marvel Universe ever since - and that extends into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where Thanos repeated his Infinity Gauntlet scheme to devastating effect in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
By themselves, the alien races are known as the Kree and the Skrulls have always been enough of a threat to Earth to warrant either of their places on this list. However, it is their ongoing war, a struggle that has claimed countless lives, worlds, and colonies of both races, that has precipitated the greatest conflicts between the Kree, the Skrulls, and the Avengers.
For the Kree, their greatest conflict with the Avengers came during Avengers: Operation Galactic Storm , when the Kree went to war with another alien race, the Shi'ar. During the conflict, the Shi'ar created a massive device called a Nega-Bomb, designed to destroy the entire Kree civilization.
After Captain America convinced the Shi'ar not to detonate the bomb, it was stolen by the Skrulls who detonated it anyway, devastating the Kree empire. It was later revealed that the entire war, including the construction and detonation of the Nega-Bomb, were all manipulations of the Kree Supreme Intelligence, a being composed of the psyches of many great Kree, to kick-start Kree evolution.
Though the enduringly dastardly collective hasn't always been led by a Zemo, the connection between the villainous dynasty and the Masters of Evil is inextricable. Founded by the elder Zemo, the former Nazi scientist Heinrich, as a force to oppose the newly founded Avengers, and, by extension, Zemo's old nemesis Captain America, the Masters quickly grew from a handful of second-string henchmen into one of the most feared and formidable groups to ever oppose the Mighty Avengers.
Aside from the Zemos, the Masters have been lead by such villains as Ultron, Dr. Octopus, Justine Hammer, and Egghead, and included almost every menace ever to oppose the Avengers, along with numerous rogues more associated with other Marvel heroes. At one time boasting a roster consisting of almost 20 villains including the entire Wrecking Crew, the Absorbing Man, Mr.
Hyde, and too many others to name the Masters of Evil have almost always been a formidable force. It was this veritable army of supervillains, lead by founder Heinrich Zemo's heir, Helmut, that saw the Masters of Evil's greatest moment of triumph over the Avengers. In the legendary story ' Under Siege ,' the Masters lead an attack on Avengers Mansion that left the building in ruins, the Avengers scattered and broken, and their ever-faithful servant Jarvis on death's door.
Though the Masters have not had much activity since Helmut Zemo tricked the world into thinking they were heroes founding the Thunderbolts in the process , Zemo's recent return to villainy would imply that it may only be a matter of time before the Masters of Evil are once again in play. No Avengers villain has a stranger dichotomy in his relationship to Earth's Mightiest Heroes than Loki, the Asgardian prince of lies who appears found new life and new facets to be explored after his cinematic appearances in The Avengers and the three Thor movies, and most recently in Disney Plus' Loki.
While he has menaced the team to the point of near constancy, he is also directly responsible for the team's founding. In a scheme designed to pit the Hulk against his brother Thor, he inadvertently alerted several other powerful superhumans to his scheme, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The original 'threat no single hero could withstand,' few villains in all of Marveldom can match Loki's power, and none his cunning, trickery, and manipulation, though many of them actually received their powers from Loki himself. Like most of the Avengers' greatest enemies, he shares a familial connection to the team, in the form of his brother Thor, the mightiest of the Mighty Avengers.
In recent times, Loki's unending schemes lead to the fall of Asgard at the hands of his seeming ally, Norman Osborn, as well as the death of Avenger and Olympian war god Ares in the limited series Siege. Though his villainy eventually also led to his own downfall, Loki was reborn in the pages of Journey Into Mystery and continues to pop up to this day.
Though he has been known by many names or, in modern Marvel terms, Variants the man once called Nathaniel Richards is best known, and most feared, as Kang, the Conqueror. A time-traveling warlord from an alternate Earth, Kang is one of the Avengers' oldest foes, having menaced them in his various guises almost since the team's inception.
At times appearing as the Scarlet Centurion, Rama-Tut, Victor Timely, Iron Lad, and Immortus, Kang's goal has almost always been the same; to find, defeat, and yes, conquer the greatest warriors and civilizations throughout time and space. Kang's finest hour came at the end of Kurt Busiek's legendary Avengers run in the story Avengers: The Kang Dynasty when he actually succeeded in conquering the Earth.
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