10 Movies Where You Want The Villain To Win

The moment Josh Brolin’s big purple wrongdoer strides onto the screen, soft-spoken and sinister, we know we’re in for a treat. The Russo brothers summed up Infinity War as essentially the Thanos movie, and the structure of the plot supports this view. He gets much more character development and screen time compared to other Marvel villains, as well as managing to gain all six infinity stones and wiping out half the universe with a snap of his fingers.

Whilst plenty of people on the internet - particularly the type of people who should probably go outside more often - support Thanos’ genocidal outlook on intergalactic overpopulation, his plan really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Wouldn’t the universe just return to this supposed population threshold after a certain amount of time? Couldn’t he use the literal infinite power of the gauntlet to make the universe twice as big? Or simply ensure there would always be enough resources to support sentient life?

No. What makes Thanos so compelling, and makes us root for him on some level, is our desire to see something totally unpredictable happen in a Marvel movie. We’d spent nearly a decade watching our heroes defeat various villains over and over again, and despite the general good quality of these adventures, the format was becoming fairly stale. To see a charismatic antagonist like Thanos actually manage to defeat the Avengers rewrote our expectations of Marvel movies going forward, and cemented Thanos’ iconic status.