5 Inherent Problems That Explain Why Every Marvel Villain Is Boring

2. They're Always Direct Opposites To The Hero

Iron Man fights other guys in metal suits. Thor fights other near-indestructible beings from across the nine realms. Ant-Man fights other shrinking people. Captain America fights other super soldiers. Hulk fights other Hulks. Heck, when you strip away all the alien and robot armies in the team-ups (which are such cannon-fodder they have no impact on tension at all), all you're left with is a villain biometrically opposed to a key Avenger. Isn't it all a bit monotonous?

When you pit two equally matched foes against each other, not only is it rather unengaging to watch, you know the outcome is going to be based on some narrative convenience. Iron Man 3 switched things up somewhat with the Extremis soldiers, but their threat was still built on the same faceless army/power-balanced conflict.

The key problem here is that, although a part of a greater universe, outside of the big team ups each MCU sub-franchise has kinda kept to itself (Iron Man is grounded, Thor is high-fantasy etc.) meaning that the pool of villain types that can fit the defined tone is smaller. Thankfully, this is something that may be rectified as the shared nature of the world has an ever-greater presence - as crossovers like Falcon's in Ant-Man become the norm, the tonal lines will get blurred and you can actually hope to see Tony Stark take on an old guy with magic rings, or Ant-Man tackling gargantuan beasts.

This is something Game Of Thrones mastermind and professional procrastinator George R.R. Martin has raised recently, and he'd know - he was famously a massive comic book fan as a kid, constantly sending in letters to Marvel.