10 Movie Villains Secretly Introduced Way Earlier Than You Realise

For so many movies, key to any success is having a good villain in play. As the old adage goes, every great hero needs a great villain.

It's logic like this that makes Batman and Spider-Man such beloved pop culture characters, as those two have a particularly fascinating array of rogues and wrong 'uns ready to cause chaos and carnage at the drop of a hat. But heroes and villains are characteristics and characters not merely restricted to the capes 'n' tights brigade, of course.

Part of what makes cinema so brilliant across the board is the multitude of iconic antagonists it has served up over the decades. And while another element of delight is seeing an ominous, eyeball-popping WTF reveal of a villain, there have been occasions when those shock reveals were actually teased to audiences way earlier than they thought - or even where the seeds for a sinister swerve had been planted long before the film that we're watching.

When looking across the history of modern cinema, then, here are a few choice examples of those times when some truly huge villains were secretly introduced right under our noses - and we all likely completely missed it!

The first time that Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio, turns up in Spider-Man: Far From Home, he's positioned as a superhero from an alternative Earth.

Acting as a mentor to young Peter Parker, Beck manages to wangle himself custody of Tony Stark's swanky EDITH tech before the reveal is eventually made that Mysterio is a disgruntled former Stark employee who had embraced the dark side.

While that first appearance of Mysterio is as one of the good guys, attentive viewers may have managed to spot that this rogue actually makes his presence known earlier than we all thought. As Tom Holland's Peter does his best to try and enjoy his school vacation to Venice, Gyllenhaal's Beck can be seen passing by ol' Web-head, casually keeping tabs on Parker while acting as nothing more than just a background face in a crowd.

If you go back to watch those scenes of Peter Parker exploring some of the sights offered up by the famed Italian city, you can actually see Quentin Beck at several points - all before these two would formally meet, and obviously way before the Far From Home narrative showed Beck's true motivation.