Over 15 years and 33 films, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has thrown countless seemingly insurmountable obstacles and more than a few apocalyptic events at their line-up of superheroes trying to save the world, the universe and reality itself. Their villains are at the head of all of this; crazed scientists, treacherous government agents, brutal alien warlords, amoral industrialists, gods and monsters and everything in between, an MCU villain can be so many things. Some were unfortunately the weakest elements in the movies they appeared in, being either generic, poorly served by the script or misjudged in their performances, while others ended up being memorable highlights even above the title costumed characters. 

There are often multiple antagonists in these superhero stories so we’ve tried to stick to one villain per MCU film. This is except where it’s the same antagonist carried over into a sequel film, and in cases where there’s more than one threat to our heroes. In these instances, we’ve focussed on the most active baddies or the masterminds of the various diabolical plots.

This ranking will be based on the level of threat the various bad guys pose to our supremely skilled and miraculously superpowered heroes, the diabolical creativity of their respective master plans and the sheer evilness of their actions. Spoilers ahead!

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31. Malekith – Thor: The Dark World (2013)

“Look upon my legacy, Algrim. I can barely remember a time before the light.” 

A dark elf conqueror with a vendetta against Asgard for a defeat in ancient times, Malekith is reawakened and plots to snuff out the light across the universe (because his kind really like the darkness of the void).

A hugely distinct and memorable villain from the comics became one of the most boring to ever antagonise a superhero movie. Whatever Christopher Eccleston was trying to do with his performance after undergoing many uncomfortable hours in the makeup chair was lost in a brutally hacked film edit and an all-round po-faced determination to live up to the “dark” of the title.

Note: dark is not the same as interesting. 

30. Ivan Vanko/Whiplash – Iron Man 2 (2010)

“You come from a family of thieves and butchers, and like all guilty men, you try to rewrite your history.”

Whiplash is a Stark-hating, parrot-loving nuclear physicist/inventor with arc reactor-powered whips and an army of drones to carry out his revenge.

Mickey Rourke got a lot of jobs in quick succession as various shades of tough guy in this period. The Wrestler this is not, and he doesn’t exactly stretch himself as Ivan, offering a barely passable Russian accent and playing with a toothpick as a poor substitute for a more intricate characterisation as he plots vaguely defined Cold War-fuelled vengeance on Tony Stark and the American Military Industrial Complex.

29. Emil Blonsky/Abomination – The Incredible Hulk (2008)

“If I took what I had now, and put it in a body that I had ten years ago, that would be someone I wouldn’t want to fight.”

Abomination is an unstable British Black Ops asset who volunteers for a series of dangerous experimental super soldier treatments in order to capture the Hulk.

The Incredible Hulk worked best when it was Marvel’s answer to a Universal Monster movie, but one of its weakest elements was having Blonsky as its villain. Roth is fine, but he just wasn’t all that threatening, the character thinly sketched as a violent jerk with a superiority complex. When he finally transforms into his bony green alter ego Abomination for a CG smashathon in Harlem, it becomes almost impossible to care.

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28. Dar-Benn – The Marvels (2023)

“I always come back.”

Continuing what Ronan the Accuser started, Kree warrior Dar-Benn seeks to unite the two powerful Cosmic Bands in order to open portals across the galaxy to pillage resources from countless worlds to restore her dying planet of Hala and reassert her species’ dominance in the galaxy.

The problem with Dar-Benn is not her evil-for-the-right-reasons master plan or her relative threat level to our heroes (which is considerable considering that with space-magical enhancement she can hold her own against three formidable supes at once), it’s that there’s nothing else to her.

We needed more time for layers to come though Zawe Ashton’s broad, pantomimey performance and she too often feels like a retread of the kinds of villains we’ve seen in the MCU many times before, just a means to an end.

27. Ava Starr/Ghost – Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

“It hurts. It always hurts.”

The Marvels Review

A scientist’s daughter with an unnatural condition that causes her to painfully phase in and out of the physical realm, Ghost resorts to stealing Pymtech to survive.

Ghost is an admirable attempt to make something interesting out of a gimmicky physics-based villain. The character is let down not by Hannah John-Kamen’s engaging and tortured performance but by her essential irrelevance to the film’s main plot and lack of enough meaningful screen time. It’s almost like they only decided late in the day that Ant-Man and the Wasp should have an antagonist at all, and that may have been the wrong decision for this particular movie. 

26. Ronan – Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

“I don’t recall killing your family. I doubt I’ll remember killing you either.”

Ronan is a Kree fanatic who courts war and is gathering enough power to wipe the planet Xandar from the galaxy.

Ronan, with his war paint, samurai helmet and big hammer has a strong look, and thanks to Lee Pace he is given an imposing presence and a rumbling voice. But you’d struggle to claim he had much in the way of depth as a character. He wants a weapon to destroy a planet because because he’s from a war-like race and that’s about it, though Pace’s affronted expression and confused “what are you doing?” as Star-Lord dances in front of him as he’s trying to trigger an apocalypse is pretty memorable.

25. Darren Cross/Yellowjacket – Ant-Man (2015)

“Did you think you could stop the future with a heist?”

Ant-Man Review

Hank Pym’s protégé, ouster and successor at his company, Yellowjacket seeks to weaponise and sell Pym’s shrinking technology to the highest bidder.

Marvel has a lot of evil CEOs in its rogues gallery and Corey Stoll brings plenty of punchable arrogance to his performance as Darren Cross. He murders rivals and exterminates animal test subjects without second thought, seemingly motivated by Pym not trusting him with the secrets of his technology (though really it’s because he enjoys doing it). 

Cross does have probably the most gruesome villain death in the MCU so far, and it’s no more than he deserves.

The Spider-Man franchise has gone through more reboots than any other comic book character since Sam Raimi first brought him to the big screen in 2002. Over that time, whoever currently fills out the spandex has faced a variety of crazed scientists, criminals and rivals brought up to Spider-Man’s level by advanced technology, superpower-bestowing industrial accidents and cunning exploitation of the hero’s secret identity.

4 iterations of Spider-Man, 10 movies, many bad guys to fight, but which were the biggest threat to him and his nearest and dearest? A web of spoilers lies ahead in this edition of Ranked from The Film Magazine: Feature Film Spider-Man Villains Ranked.

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16. Aleksei Sytsevich / Rhino – The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

“I am the Rhino! I told you I’d be back!”

A Russian mobster embarrassingly foiled by Spider-Man during a heist involving an armoured truck and a lot of plutonium, Aleksei is only too happy to don a rhinoceros-shaped mech suit (like you do) gifted by Oscorp’s Special Projects division to get his own back.

Aleksei is small-time, a wannabe tough gangster shown to be humiliatingly inept in his two fights against Spidey that bookend The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The usually-excellent Paul Giamatti is outshone by his forehead tattoo and is reduced to shouting in an outrageous accent straight out of a terrible Cold War action movie as he is webbed up and pantsed in his civilian clothes and then defeated in freeze-frame in his stupid robot rhino form.

15. Harry Osborn / Green Goblin – The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

“You don’t give people hope, you take it away. I’m gonna take away yours.”

Peter Parker’s childhood friend returns to New York to say goodbye to his terminally ill father and discovers he carries the same genetic blood disease that makes you grow talons and turn green. Harry discovers that Spider-Man’s altered blood may somehow offer a cure but, when the hero refuses him, he takes an untested spider venom formula that warps his body and mind, leading him to take vengeance against the Wall-Crawler.

We’re told rather than shown that Peter and Harry have a history here and expected to buy Dane DeHaan’s twitchy take on the character’s rapid physical, mental and moral decline simply because we know a Green Goblin has got to show up in this Spider-Man universe some time, somehow.

In the race to set up a Sinister Six spin-off movie that never happened, all of Harry’s characterisation seems to have been excised so we’re left with a petty arch-nemesis who meets the Webslinger precisely twice and decides to kill his girlfriend on a whim because it took him a ridiculously long time to remember his company had made a battle suit with a bodily repair function and only used it after he’d already taken the uglifying spider-formula.

14. Eddie Brock / Venom – Spider-Man 3 (2007)

“Oh! My spider-sense is tingling… if you know what I’m talking about!”

A shady and arrogant photographer and rival to Peter Parker at the Daily Bugle who gets taken over by an alien symbiote and plans to take revenge on Parker for the part he played in Brock losing his job.

Before Tom Hardy took the role down the schizophrenic antihero route, Topher Grace brought a very different version of Eddie Brock to life. First he’s just a jerk competing with Peter for a staff photographer job before his faked photos get him blacklisted. Then, coincidence of coincidences, he goes to pray at the same cathedral where Peter is trying to separate himself from the personality-altering symbiote in the bell tower above. The symbiote jumps to Eddie and he immediately goes all the way bad and hatches a plan to make Peter/Spider-Man suffer.

Very obviously a late addition to Spider-Man 3’s plot by a reluctant Sam Raimi, Venom is only really in the film for the final action scene and is a very simplistic, weirdly camp take on the character who fails to leave any real impression.

Recommended for you: 10 Best Moments from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man Trilogy

Back in 2002, Spider-Man earned the reputation of a “living comic book”, unmatched by its comic book rivals at the time. Whilst Sam Raimi did lean towards campiness and exaggeration in his trilogy, the film was made with such a deftness of touch that it avoided guilty-pleasure status and instead earned plenty of critical praise and box office dollars, becoming a cultural touchstone in the process.

In examining the career of Sam Raimi you can see how much his background helped this trilogy to succeed. Starting literally from the bottom, making Super 8 home-movies with friends from high school and then being thrust into prominence when his feature-length directorial debut The Evil Dead (1981) became a sleeper hit, Raimi has progressed from independent to blockbuster over the course of his career. His beloved horror output echoes the appeal and traits seen in his Spider-Man trilogy, illustrating his flair for melding comedy and drama, the use of light-hearted beats to underline moments of terror and suspense, and his use of insane moments of extravagance to make his movies truly unforgettable.

In this Movie List from The Film Magazine we are looking back at Sam Raimi’s influential work on the original live-action Spider-Man trilogy to celebrate the unforgettable quality these films offered, choosing ten moments that best represent why this trilogy has reached immortal status. These are the 10 Best Moments from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man Trilogy, chosen in terms of artistry, their significance to the trilogy, and their influence on the superhero genre as a whole.

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10. Emo Peter Parker

There is a lot of hate heaped onto the front doorstep of the third movie of the Raimi Spider-Man Trilogy. And, as fans will attest, it is largely unwarranted. Even though many of Spider-Man 3′s flaws were mostly due to interference from Sony as opposed to Raimi’s actual vision, some fans still attempt to illustrate everything wrong with this film through pointing directly at the “Emo Peter” sequence. But that’s missing the point…

The sight of venom-corrupted Peter Parker strutting down the street shooting finger guns and rolling his hips is one of the most memorable scenes in the whole trilogy. The impact of Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire on the Spider-Man mythos (and even Marvel itself) is forever immortalised by “Bully Maguire” memes, for better or for worse.

Not only is there a hidden depth and nuance to this unfairly scorned scene – it working to illustrate the inherent quality of Peter’s goodness (as an emo haircut and a “Travolta, Saturday Night Fever” walk is his idea of a “bad boy persona”) – it’s a showcase of Raimi’s inventiveness and sense of humour, which has garnered him the adoration of fans over the years. Let’s be honest, many of the haters are those who first watched this scene as a self-conscious teenager whose enormous second hand embarrassment was a projection of their own insecurities. Relevant advice to such individuals is: grow up, sit back and have a laugh. A bit of cringe never hurt anyone.

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9. Peter Fights Flash

The original Spider-Man Trilogy’s continuing moreish quality is in large part due to Tobey Maguire’s depiction of Peter Parker: he seemingly held no fear in depicting Peter as a hapless and nerdy loser, and this hasn’t quite been matched in successive adaptations.

Peter’s character is largely shaped by the relentless bullying he has undoubtedly suffered all through High School; acts that have destroyed his confidence and halted him from expressing himself. Combined with his natural goodness and teenage angst, Peter is cinema’s most sympathetic superhero, making the journey of the discovery of his powers all that more satisfying.

Peter’s fight with Flash is a near masterclass in comedy timing with Peter’s out of control web slinging throwing school dinner all over nasty school bully Flash Thompson (Joe Manganiello). Peter dodging Flash’s slow motion punches with huge bewilderment pasted all over his face is an iconic moment of superhero pop culture. And yet it’s a moment that provides more than simple laughs, it also offers awe and spectacle the likes of which we have since come to expect from the superhero genre.

Peter backflips over six feet into the air and promptly horse kicks Flash across the corridor. Raimi’s choice to use comedy as to a tool to distract and therefore maximise the impact of Peter’s powers is masterful, plus it’s really satisfying to see meek and mild Peter Parker knock out the obnoxious school bully as the first step on his journey to herodom.

Now the top-grossing film this side of the pandemic, Spider-Man: No Way Home has solidified itself as one of the most popular and successful superhero movies ever put to film. Tom Holland caps off his Spider-Man trilogy with the most spectacular Spidey entry thus far, he and director Jon Watts offering a nostalgia-fest full to the brim with surprise returns and astonishing implications for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

In this Movie List from The Film Magazine, we’re looking at the most shocking, heart-wrenching, humorous and devasting moments of 2021’s biggest film in this, the 10 Best Spider-Man: No Way Home Moments.

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10. Matt Murdock Makes an Appearance

For fans of Netflix’s ‘Daredevil’, the surprise return of Charlie Cox in No Way Home was a welcome one. The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen was last seen in 2018 as he fought to purge the criminal underbelly of New York City, but the cancellation of all Marvel superhero series at Netflix led to a lengthy spell on the sidelines. However, the rights to Daredevil have since reverted back to Marvel, and hints of an appearance in the MCU commenced last year when Marvel President Kevin Feige assured fans that any future depiction of the character would be performed by Cox.

While he may not have donned the crimson suit, The Man Without Fear was able to offer legal counsel to Peter following the revelation of his identity. Murdock does shows a brief glimpse of his physical prowess when his quick reflexes prevent a brick from hitting Peter in the face, much to Peter’s shock and awe. “I’m a really good lawyer,” notes Murdock.

While his return was a brief one, theories are rife about his next appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially now that his archnemesis Kingpin has resurfaced once again in the ‘Hawkeye’ series on Disney+.

9. A Piece of Venom Is Left Behind

The post-credit scene has become a staple of the MCU, and experienced Marvel enthusiasts know better than to leave a screening before the credits have rolled. No Way Home continues this tradition, providing a stunning cameo in the form of Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock/Venom during the final stinger.

As the three Peters fought for their lives against an assortment of enemies in New York, Brock and Venom were sipping on cocktails in a bar in Mexico, utterly confused about their transportation to a different world. Just as he declares his intention to meet with Spider-Man in New York, Brock begins to dematerialise as he is drawn back into his own universe.

Their appearance was short-lived, but the implications will surely come back to haunt Peter in the future as a fragment of the Venom symbiote gets left behind to bond with a new host.