15 Crazy Facts You Just Have To Accept To Enjoy The Marvel Cinematic Universe

7. Villains Will Always Be Incredibly Hit & Miss

It's fair enough that, when Marvel Studios are churning out as many films as they are, they're not going to strike gold every time they go up to bat as far as their villains are concerned. Let's take a look at them so far: Iron Man's Obadiah Stane was solid, Hulk's Abomination was OK, Iron Man 2's Whiplash was horribly wasted, Thor's Loki is awesome, Captain America's Red Skull was silly fun, The Avengers made great use of Loki again, Iron Man 3's Mandarin debacle sucked, Thor: The Dark World's Malekith was horrible, The Winter Soldier ruled, and Ronan the Accuser was forgettable. It seems that Phase Two has especially suffered with a particularly pathetic set of villains so far: the problem is that, Guardians of the Galaxy, for instance, had to invest so much time in introducing its protagonists that there wasn't much room to build a compelling villain. Sure, the enigma that is Thanos is sure to make for a bada** final boss later down the line, but in terms of self-contained baddies, the MCU leaves a lot to be desired. What Can Be Done About It?: Given that the MCU has such a heavily-installed fan-base by this point, extending the run-time of the films isn't exactly going to hurt: it's no coincidence that the MCU films with the weaker villains are also largely the movies with the shorter run-times, and so adding in a few more script pages of character development is feasible without wearing audiences down too much.