8 Great TV Characters Who Die At The Beginning
7. Red Skull - Marvel's What If...?
Marvel's What If...? promised an alternate timeline for many of the heroes and villains we know and love, stepping boldly into the multiverse for Phase 4, alongside Loki, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange.
In the first episode, Captain Carter and the Hydra Stomper (skinny Steve Rogers in a tin suit) face off against the sinister Red Skull (voiced by Ross Marquand, reprising the role from Infinity War and Endgame). But more fool those of us who thought the Skull might be in for a longer haul this time, perhaps using the Tesseract to travel across dimensions and wipe out parallel universes' heroes. He is instead unceremoniously crushed by the very interdimensional abomination he sought to unleash on the world.
Granted, the episode supplied him with a definite ending (so, no freezing his bones off on Vormir in this universe), but once again failed to capitalise on the character outside the fairly restrictive frame of Nazism, in which he essentially boils down to a surrogate for Hitler.
Ultimately, Tony Stark's rogue AI Ultron (also voiced by Marquand) took centre stage as the series' overarching antagonist, when the Watcher assembled the Guardians of the Multiverse to defeat him. But, even if Red Skull couldn't have been the Biggest Bad, who wouldn't have been interested in an antagonistic team-up from the crimson nazi and Ultron?