Every James Bond Villain Ranked Worst To Best

The main villain of The Spy Who Loved Me would've been Blofeld, but since the rights issues were still unresolved, Karl Stromberg (Curt Jurgens) was written up to be the big bad instead. Bit of a shame really.

Karl Stromberg is another hit-or-miss character. He benefits from an awesome evil lair (designed again by Ken Adams, who did Blofeld's volcano lair in You Only Live Twice), his brutal offing of his own allies (sometimes with his pet shark) and Austrian actor Curd Jurgens' decent performance as him, but other aspects of Stromberg don't work.

He's a very transparent, by-the-numbers Blofeld stand-in who's not even in the movie very much and his evil plan - to destroy the world with a global war and create a new world under the sea - is too over-the-top; it's never mentioned exactly how he plans to continue underwater.

So, on the whole, Stromberg's not a particularly great villain, but he's definitely not an awful one either.