10 Insane Times Supervillains Developed New Powers

3. Thanos - Infinity Gauntlet

Thanos destroys Avengers
Marvel Comics

At this stage, Thanos needs no introduction. The villain has been compelled to such heights of stardom that pretty much everyone, their aunt and their uncle will recognise the purple-faced deviant, so ingrained is the MCU in popular culture.

It's an epic journey for a character who started out as something of a Darkseid clone, but one still worth reciting. The original Thanos was a super strong, competent combatant who was even capable of telepathy (bet you didn't know that), but when he got the Infinity Gauntlet, he approached a whole other level of power completely.

Everyone knows the story by now. In a bid to impress Lady Death, Thanos fashions a gauntlet that can wield the Infinity Gems. At the height of his frustration, he decides to lay waste to half the life in the universe, leaving it to a rag-tag band of survivors to stop him for good.

They manage to swipe the Gauntlet from Thanos by some miracle, but for the period where Thanos had command over the gems, he was omnipotent. No wonder he's considered Marvel's most dangerous adversary.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.