10 Comic Book Movies That Changed Characters For The Better

When Sam Raimi and co were developing Spider-man 2, they had some huge weird green plastic shoes to fill when it came to finding a suitable replacement villain for Willem Dafoe's perfectly psychotic take on the Green Goblin. The obvious choice was Spidey's big number two villain, Doctor Octopus.

However, up until that point, the comic book version of Doc Ock was fairly one-note, being simply a mad scientist who either wanted to blow up the world, take over the criminal underworld, or marry Aunt May for a nuclear power station (long story). In fact, it's only been in recent years - with storylines such as Doctor Octopus: Year One, Ends of the Earth and the Superior Spider-man - that the character has been properly fleshed out.

This is very much not the case for Alfred Molina's take on the multi-armed menace. We are shown what he is like before the horrific accident that turned him into a monster. We see how similar he is to Peter Parker, only with his life together and married to the love of his life.

He is what Peter could be if he tries, and we see that ideal corrupted into a violent psychopath due to a lab accident, showing the inverse of Peter's own accident, and allowing for some top-notch narrative symmetry between the two.