The secret behind a great comic book villain is, of course, a great villainous scheme; it has to be original, maybe a little outlandish, and fiendishly clever to allow us to really get behind the hero's quest to stop them. Some fantastic villain schemes, however, have been done to death so much that we as audiences have become pretty much sick of seeing them, such that we end up groaning whenever another superhero movie director tries to force them down our throat. It just demonstrates a patent lack of imagination, and no matter how colorful and thrilling the rest of the film is, without a daring and unique scheme for the hero to contend with, the movie just isn't going to be able to hang with the big boys of the genre. Here are 10 comic book movie villain plots we're all sick of seeing...
10. "You Killed My Father, Prepare To Die"
Appears In: Spider-Man 3, Iron Man 2 & The Dark Knight Rises Aren't we past this sort of plot by now? It's one of the most arbitrary and lazy villain narratives you could possibly weave; while in Spider-Man 3 and TDKR it had at least been telegraphed from earlier movies, where the heroes "killed" the villain's respective fathers, in Iron Man 2 it is just thrown in there for the Hell of it. Given that this is our first time meeting Ivan Vanko and our first time hearing about his father's death, there's not much time for us to emotionally engage with his trauma, and as a result, we don't really care. It's such an easy plot to establish that it instantly makes me assume the filmmakers are lazy and don't really care either; enough of this, and get on with something a little more imaginative.