Iron Man 3: Five Worse Comic Book Movie Villains Than The Mandarin

We're going to go ahead and assume that everyone knows there's a major, controversial twist in Iron Man 3 and that it relates to The Mandarin. We're going to spoil you no further.

So there are a good deal of people who are up in arms about "the twist" in Iron Man 3, and arguably not completely without cause. While we're all for telling the best story you can without worrying too much about fanboys getting up in arms, there's an argument to be made that the promotion for the film was disingenuous, promising fans one kind of story and then delivering another one which, even if objectively good, isn't what people came for. (The season three finale of AMC's The Walking Dead gets this same criticism.) But, to make people feel better about The Mandarin, just think back on these!

Bane (Batman & Robin) Mr. Freeze gets a lot of the criticism for this movie, but it was Bane that absolutely broke my heart as a teenager who had grown up on the Knightfall story and the Chuck Dixon era of Batman comics. In fact, you could say that Bane was the precursor for what they did to The Mandarin (in terms of stripping the character of his credibility), except that at least The Mandarin got a few cool scenes before the bait-and-switch. Bane was pretty much braindead and careening randomly around the screen in every scene he was in! Whoever the Hell Sharon Stone was in Catwoman Did you even see that movie? This requires no further explanation. Nuclear Man (Superman IV: The Quest For Peace) Nuclear Man was an admirable effort: It was an attempt to have a full-on costumed supervillain (not just "guys in odd uniforms, a la Superman II) in a major, live-action superhero movie. He was nearly as powerful as Superman and, in some ways, reminiscent of Captain Atom. So what went wrong? Wizard Magazine said it best: "Ya know what? Clones may just be worse than robots. Especially when they've got lame electric powers, 'evil nails' and only have their powers while exposed to sunlight."

Spider-Man (Spider-Man 3) Let's face it: in a movie with two villains, Peter Parker was the biggest jerk AND the biggest threat to Spider-Man. The fact that he did it while "infected" with the Venom symbiote is what lets us get away with calling him a crappy villain instead of a crappy hero in that movie, although it's admittedly a close call. Galactus Noticing a theme here? Even if you stripped away the bad and/or violated villains, it wouldn't make any of these movies better. But few things have made fanboys more annoyed in the recent past than the decision to make Galactus into a big cloud. I mean, sure--"force of nature" is a way to describe the giant cosmic entity, but as many fans pointed out at the time, if you think he looks too ridiculous to make a convincing film with him...maybe go another way?