30 Greatest Marvel Movie Villains

Marvel Studios have proven with the Marvel Cinematic Universe that you don't always need a great villain to make a successful movie: Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World and Guardians of the Galaxy all featured wildly underwhelming central villains you won't much remember.

That said, anything Marvel Studios makes tends to turn to box office gold, so they're basically the genre outlier here. As a rule, great superhero movies are often defined by their bad guys, and if nothing else, it certainly helps to have the hero facing off against someone of at least equal power and intellect.

As such, you won't find the likes of Viper, Ronan the Accuser, the Hand, Juggernaut, Emma Frost, Dracula, Dr. Doom or Galactus on this list, but rather those villains who elevated both the movie they're in and the superheroes they faced.

None of them were perfect and some were in fact deserving of a much better movie, but each certainly left a defining impact all the same. Here are the 30 best Marvel movie villains...

Alright, alright, so there's a reason Jigsaw ended up so low down on this list: firstly, he's in a pretty questionable movie, and he's in one that pretty much nobody watched.

That said, Jigsaw is one of Marvel's few R-rated villains, and more to the point, an R-rated villain who fully commits to that designation. After his face is brutally mangled by a glass-crushing machine in the movie's first act, Jigsaw becomes increasingly unhinged throughout the film, recruiting his cannibal brother Loony Bin Jim for good measure and allowing the brilliant Dominic West to give a knowingly hammy, deliciously off-the-wall performance.

This one is all about the portrayal rather than the particulars of the character's scheme, but it's certainly a breath of fresh air from the safer-playing baddies we get in most Marvel movies.