10 Movie Villains Who Caused Their Own Defeats

3. Belloq, Donovan, & Spalko (Indiana Jones Series)

Raiders Of The Lost Ark Belloq Ark
Paramount Pictures

The Defeats: Belloq, Donovan, and Spalko are the villains of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, The Last Crusade, and Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, respectively, and all three are killed by supernatural or extra-terrestrial forces.

Belloq has his mind blown (not in the good way) when he opens the Ark of the Covenant, Donovan drinks water from the wrong cup and shrivels up like a prune, and Spalko is sort of... disintegrated by aliens.

How They Caused Them: There's a running joke fans like to make about the Indiana Jones franchise, and when you actually look at it, it's not really a joke at all. Indy could literally stay at home and let the bad guys hunt the treasure/artifact/MacGuffin by themselves, and events would play out more-or-less how they do in the films: they would find said treasure, and it would kill them.

If Indy doesn't show up in Raiders, Belloq might still find the Ark, and if he did, he'd open it, killing himself. In Crusade, the same goes for Donovan, and in Kingdom, the same goes for Spalko. All of these bad guys would find their treasures eventually, even if Indy never showed his face.

Our hero does very little to stop them, and really, he doesn't need to: he just has to watch as their greed and lust for power leads them to their deaths.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!