If the box office figures are to be believed, there’s nothing that moviegoing audiences love more than watching Earth’s Mightiest Heroes join forces to take down a common enemy. All four of the Avengers movies rank among the highest-grossing films ever made. These team-up stories both unified the Marvel Cinematic Universe and broke new ground for blockbuster cinema, making ambitious franchise crossovers the norm.
While heroes like Tony Stark and Steve Rogers have been praised for their depth, charm, and multi-movie character development, the Avengers franchise’s villains are a mixed bag. Thanos is hailed as not only one of the greatest villains in the MCU, but also one of the most memorable, well-rounded villains from any movie. But, at the same time, Ultron has become a famous example of a villain failing to live up to their full potential.
Ulysses Klaue
Ulysses Klaue was first introduced in Avengers: Age of Ultron. As a South-African black-market arms dealer, he represents a stepping stone between the Avengers and their unscrupulous cybernetic nemesis. Klaue remembers Tony Stark from his days as a weapon manufacturer, which was a great way to integrate him into the MCU.
Andy Serkis is delightfully eccentric in this role, and that performance gets a fun debut here, but the actor is restricted by delivering expository dialogue that moves the plot forward. His role in Age of Ultron just serves to set up his more substantial role in Black Panther.
The Black Order
In Infinity War and Endgame, Thanos is backed up by four interchangeable sycophants, collectively known as “The Black Order,” or the “Children of Thanos.” These characters are typical Marvel baddies who speak exclusively in diabolical soundbites.
The Children of Thanos are just a cut above the many armies of faceless, mindless drones that the Avengers have battled over the years. Ebony Maw, Proxima Midnight, Corvus Glaive, and Cull Obsidian each have slightly more personality than the average Chitauri, Ultronian, or Outrider henchman, but only slightly.
Ultron
The titular villain in the second Avengers movie is a timely concept for a supervillain. With hacking and surveillance technology and artificial intelligence all on the rise, it was prudent for the Avengers to face an evil cyborg. Ultron is designed to help humanity and instantly turns against it, perfectly summarizing the fear of A.I. becoming sentient.
Ultron is determined to wipe out the human race, but the script doesn’t utilize the full potential of a cybernetic menace who can hack into any computer in the world. Age of Ultron just culminates in another final battle with a faceless army of goons. The cyborg is defeated like any other supervillain: by being punched over and over again. James Spader makes up for the missteps in Ultron’s characterization with a truly unsettling vocal performance. He plays Ultron as a dark take on Pinocchio, breaking free of his strings and using his newfound free will to torment humanity.
Brainwashed Hawkeye
For the first half of the original Avengers movie, Hawkeye is technically a villain, because Loki controls his brain with the Mind Stone and forces him to use his archery prowess for evil. This hero-turned-villain plot point presents an interesting conflict: Black Widow has to stop Hawkeye because he’s doing Loki’s bidding, but at the same time, she doesn’t want to hurt her best friend.
This conflict eventually boils down to a climactic fight on the Helicarrier. She thunks his head against a metal bar to knock the Mind Stone’s influence out of his brain.
Loki
Tom Hiddleston’s Loki broke the MCU’s one-and-done villain curse. While the MCU’s heroes tend to enjoy decade-long character arcs across various film and TV projects, most of its villains only stick around for one movie. But Hiddleston’s turn as the God of Mischief has been embraced so readily by Marvel fans that he’s charted a longer arc than most of the heroes. He’s currently the star of his own hit streaming series. After tormenting his thunderous sibling in the first Thor movie, Loki was upgraded to menacing every other flagship MCU hero in the first Avengers film.
Loki already had a personal connection to one of the Avengers, being the adopted brother of Thor, but in the MCU’s first ensemble team-up, he developed tangible dynamics with a bunch of other heroes as he exacted his diabolical plan. Steve Rogers’ quest for freedom stands at odds with the trickster god’s goal of oppression. Loki’s ego clashes with Tony Stark’s, while his biting wit finds its match in Natasha Romanoff. And, of course, he gets thrashed around by the Hulk.
Thanos
Like Blofeld in the first run of James Bond films, Thanos was teased in supporting roles and off-screen appearances before emerging as the Avengers’ arch-nemesis. The Mad Titan was teased in two credits scenes across six years before finally terrorizing Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in their third big-screen outing. Josh Brolin managed the impossible with this role, humanizing a character who’s both a genocidal maniac from another planet and a ridiculous-looking purple goofball with, according to Star-Lord, a “nutsack of a chin.”
Thanos is essentially the protagonist of Infinity War. The Avengers come and go from the Mad Titan’s story as the movie charts his own personal “hero’s journey.” He’s the hero of his own story with a singular goal: to collect all six Infinity Stones and wipe out half of all life in the universe to allow the other half to prosper.