Over the years, superhero and comic book lovers have been treated to premium doses of live-action superhero movies. Even though it’s great seeing our favourite superheroes in live-action, there is one known fact when it comes to making a superhero movie great and worth watching; an action movie – whether superhero or not, is only as good as it’s villain.
We’ve seen it all so far in superhero universes; Villains dancing like gypsies, villains in plain, bland CGI… even plainer, blander CGI… Villains with a whip-fetish (I mean, who wastes such resources on a freaking whip?), villains that spend way more time talking than fighting, villains who love to put on purplish eye-shadow, and a whole lot of forgettable villains.
However, we’ve also seen great villains whose performances left a deep impression on people’s hearts. So today, we at Cinemashed will be counting down our top 10 best supervillains.
10. Mandarin
I know Iron Man 3 wasn’t everyone’s favourite movie because of the unnecessary plot change with the mandarin – going from one of Iron Man’s most prominent villains (a man who wields rings of unimaginable power to becoming a fire breathing-regenerating-magma man (or whatever he was meant to be). But regardless, Guy Pearce’s performance as Aldrich Killian/Mandarin was one worthy of making my list because he gave Tony something important to think about – his ego. Since the first Iron Man movie and all the movies he’s been in, leading up to Iron Man 3, he had an ego that was the size of Asgard, but Mandarin giving him a dose of reality helped change Tony Stark and made him the right-kind of Iron Man.
9. Abomination
Although the movie didn’t hit big at the box office, it was really good finally seeing a worthy villain for The Hulk on the silver screen (after that Eric Bana’s Hulk movie, which one should never speak of again). Tim Roth’s performance as Abomination has made him a worthy inclusion to this list because he actually owned the character I had read (and still reading) about in the comics. It’s still sad that we haven’t gotten any other Hulk movie since then, especially when The Incredible Hulk movie set up The Leader’s introduction to the MCU perfectly.
8. Vulture
After enough Spiderman movies to give the webhead his own superhero universe, I was a bit sceptical about Spiderman: Homecoming’s ability to give us the same experience that the former separate Spiderverses gave us especially when they chose to screen a villain who didn’t really hold much weight in the comics. But thankfully, Michael Keaton delivered as the Vulture. I guess that’s the impact you get when a former Batman (whose character many sometimes describe as an antihero) comes in to play a villain as minor as Vulture; you get a major dose of greatness. Vulture was a great way to re-introduce Tom Holland’s Spiderman again into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I absolutely loved the villain… Still got mixed feelings about the movie generally though.