9 Actors Who Almost Played Comic Book Villains

8. John Malkovich - Green Goblin/The Vulture

Jesse Eisenberg Adam Driver
Netflix

John Malkovich has a beguiling, unhinged, and intellectual quality about him that would be perfect for a movie supervillain. Hell, even just looking at him and you can see him playing any number of iconic comic book bad guys.

Hollywood thought so too, and the actor was Sam Raimi's first pick for the role of Green Goblin in the director's box-office guzzling reinvention of Spider-Man in 2002. Only one problem... Malkovich wasn't all that enthusiastic, saying that "it's not really my genre" and "those sort of films aren't art films, they're business propositions."

You'd expect him to have burnt his bridges with comments like those, but Raimi approached Malkovich again during pre-production for the ill-fated Spider-Man 4, with an offer to play the Vulture, before plans for the movie as a whole fell apart.

Two Spider-Man reboots later, and Vulture eventually showed up in the guise of Michael Keaton in 2017's Spider-Man Homecoming. Given just how good he was, it's hard to mourn too much, even though Malkovich too would've been a great pick.

Contributor

Oliver Smith hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.