Spider-Man's Best Movie Villains, Ranked

Like most (but not all) superhero movies, a good Spider-Man film is only as good as its villain. And thankfully, there've been more than a few memorable ones in the last 24 years. 

It can, however, be a delicate thing: as we saw in Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, having too many can leave the story feeling a little thin. The exception to this rule is this year's Spider-Man: Brand New Day, in which characters like Scorpion, the Hand and the Hulk are—spoiler alert—manipulated by Jean Grey to fight Spider-Man—but as Grey turns out to essentially be on his side, we decided that she's technically ineligible for this list.

Luckily for us, there is no shortage of proper villains to choose from in the 11 standalone Spider-Man movies that've been released so far—a run that stretches back to when Tobey Maguire first started slinging webs in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man in 2002. In the list below, I’ve rounded up the ten best villains we’ve seen so far (based on a combination of performance, character depth and threat level) and arranged them in descending order.

Read on for a bit more info on each of them and use the links to find out where to watch their movies in all the usual places. And if you've not seen any of the movies on this list, just be warned that we need to go into spoiler territory to properly discuss each character.

10. Spider-Man 2099/Miguel O'Hara (Oscar Isaac)

This one might be controversial, as Spider-Man 2099 isn’t exactly your typical villain—he is a Spider-Man after all, and a particularly cool one, at least for a while—but he does enough villainous stuff in Across the Spider-Verse to warrant inclusion.

Like several characters on this list, Spider-Man 2099, otherwise known as Miguel O’Hara, begins the movie as a seemingly benevolent ally before eventually showing his true colours as the leader of the Spider Society.

Voiced with plenty of dramatic presence by Oscar Isaac, O’Hara is a powerful Spider-Villain with a tragic backstory and a decent motive—i.e. keeping the Spider-Verse in balance by ensuring that each Spidey follows their canonical events. When Miles decides to go against this, O’Hara doesn’t wait long to lock him up—but it's not too late for a redemption arc in Beyond the Spider-Verse. 

9. Kurt Conners/Lizard (Rhys Ifans)

Like Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker, Rhys Ifans’ Lizard was an above-average Spidey villain in a below-average Spider movie. That movie, of course, was the first Amazing Spider-Man. That it ended up being the better of the two was in part thanks to Ifans’ performance. 

Conners is a man whose determination to help humanity (however goofy that plan is) eventually leads to his own destruction. This puts him in a long lineage of troubled genius bad guys in the Spider-Man movies—with an emphasis on the “troubled” part. He got to return in No Way Home, albeit without a whole lot to do. 

8. Spot (Jason Schwartzman)

Considering that Miles Morales has yet to beat him, it might be jumping the gun, but Spot's introduction in Across the Spider-Verse was memorable enough to place eighth on our list.

This is as much down to his creepiness and dangerous unpredictability as it is to the downbeat nihilism that Jason Schwartzman brings to the role. Expect this one to move up a bit after Beyond the Spider-Verse is released. 

7. Prowler/Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali)

Another Spider-Man baddie who’s shown up in multiple forms over the years is Prowler, the best of which is still Mahershala Ali’s touching turn in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Not only is he top-tier for the multiple Oscar winner’s voice work but for the tragic reveal that he’s Miles’ uncle Aaron.

Given that Miles Morales is one of the only Spider-Men whose parents are still alive, we probably should have seen Aaron's death coming a mile away, and yet that twist still comes as an affecting surprise. Lightning quick, strong and ruthless, he’s a formidable villain in the movie, but it’s his emotional character arc that really stays with you. 

6. Sandman/Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church)

Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman unfortunately popped up in Spider-Man 3, otherwise known as the not great Sam Raimi one. As mentioned above, it was also a movie with too many bad guys, meaning that Church’s Sandman had to share the screen (and the villainy) with James Franco’s Green Goblin and Topher Grace’s Venom.

But don’t let that get in the way of the good work that Church puts in as Flint Marko, an escaped convict who has an unlucky incident with a particle accelerator—talk about 'Dunesday'.

Church got the role off the back of his Oscar-nominated turn in Sideways but chose to bring none of that character’s humour to his endearing, sad dad-coded version of Marko. He also looked a hell of a lot like him.

5. Mysterio/Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal)

That last of the very good but not quite great villains on this list is Mysterio, the central villain of Spider-Man: Far From Home—even if it takes our usually astute hero a minute to realise.

The movie was the first MCU outing of the post-Stark era and mostly concerned the blossoming romance between Peter and M.J. and the difficulty of returning to reality (and high school) after five years blipped away.

Still, the movie needs someone for Spidey to fight in the final third—and so in steps Jake Gyllenhaal’s disgruntled Stark Industries employee and his coterie of greedy colleagues. Granted, they aren't exactly a planetary threat, but after the high-stakes drama of Endgame, they were exactly the level of villain that this movie needed.

4. The Vulture/Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton)

Knowing that Spider-Man: Homecoming had a little more heavy lifting to do, not least in terms of introducing a character who was going to eventually carry the MCU going forward, director Jon Watts could have easily phoned it in with the antagonist. Instead, Watts hired an actor who helped to invent the modern superhero movie and got him to take on a role that nodded to post-financial crisis disillusionment. He also provided one of the cleanest twists in the franchise’s history. 

That man was, of course, the former caped crusader himself, Michael Keaton, who took on the role of Vulture at the height of his Birdman (no relation) renaissance. In the comics, the character is no one’s idea of a Mt. Rushmore Spidey-Villain, but Keaton made Vulture his own. 

3. Kingpin/Wilson Fisk (Liev Schreiber)

With Vincent D'Onofrio’s Kingpin still to make his big-screen debut in the MCU, the only modern movie version of the character we’ve seen so far is the one voiced by Liev Schreiber in Into the Spider-Verse. Thankfully, the writers and animators of Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s film absolutely knocked it out of the park—as did Schreiber with his phenomenal voice work.

This wonderfully imposing take on the character not only kills Chris Pine’s Spider-Man in the opening minutes, but he also gets one of the most tragic, convincing and quickly explained backstories of any Spider-Man villain we’ve yet seen. With Schreiber’s broken-hearted line readings, it’s kind of hard not to feel for the guy—even when he’s threatening to tear apart the fabric of reality.  

2. The Green Goblin/Norman Osbourne (Willem Dafoe)

The top two here are basically interchangeable, depending on the day, but seeing as we’re in the list-making business, it’s only fair we choose one. This means a very honourable second place has to go to Willem Dafoe’s Norman Osbourne/Green Goblin in Spider-Man—a piece of casting so perfect that it’s hard to imagine anyone else even being considered. 

This is the performance that gave us the meme, of course, but it’s also a character who set the tone for most Spider-Man movie villains going forward—in other words, he's a brilliant genius who bites off a little more than he can chew and eventually loses control to his own megalomania.

Nobody pulled off the dual personality aspect of this quite like Dafoe, who works his iconic grin to the absolute limit for the part. It might not have ended well for Aunt May, but his return in No Way Home only burnished the character's legend even more.

1. Dr Octopus/Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina)

Unlike Dafoe, Alfred Molina plays it a little over the top in No Way Home and never quite finds the grace notes of his performance in Raimi’s original (why they didn’t get him to say “Parker, brilliant but lazy” still baffles me). However, judged solely on Spider-Man 2, his Otto Octavius remains the best Spider-Man movie villain we've seen so far.

Of course, he's a brilliant and well-meaning scientist who allows his mind to run away from him, but Molina gives him so much soul and charm in his earlier scenes as well as outrageous swagger in his later ones that I never tire of watching him.

It helps that he’s in Spider-Man 2, which most people still agree is the best Spider-Movie ever. It also helps that Raimi gives him not only one of the best villain reveal scenes in Marvel history but also perhaps the most iconic fight sequence, too. In terms of style and direction, Raimi rises to the occasion on both counts, and Molina easily meets him there with a performance that blends occasional flashes of vulnerability with moustache-twirling levels of comic book villainy.