What's the Matter with Superheroes, Part 3: The Villain Problem

I’ve tried my hand at writing a superhero movie from scratch, and quickly found that it’s a lot harder than it looks. One of many problems you have to solve is this: where do the villains come from? It’s hard enough to dream up a situation that would create and motivate a super-hero, but now you have to create an equally powerful super-villain and quickly smash them together. There are, of course, short-cuts that will get you there, but those short-cuts create their own problems.

Let’s start by looking at the different types of super-villain origin, pro and con:

Completely separate origin from the hero: Superman, All three of the original Spider-Man movies, Captain America 2, Iron Man 3, Fantastic Four 2

• Pros: The hero is in the clear morally. Somebody would have needed to stop this bad guy, so it’s good that the hero was there.
• Cons: If it’s the first one, it takes an awful long time to set up two origin stories (think Green Goblin in Spider-Man 1), and even later it distracts from the story a lot (think Sandman in Spider-Man 3)

Same incident creates both: Superman 2, Fantastic Four 1, the new “Flash” TV show, “Smallville”, all six X-Men movies, Captain America 1 (the Red Skull, that is. The rest of the Nazis are in the previous category), The recent Spider-Man reboot

• Pros: Much easier to write and more streamlined.
• Cons: It’s all a bit of a wash, isn’t it? One part of the problem wipes out another part of the problem. Civilians still would have been better off if the whole mess had never happened.

Villains creates himself or his weapon using the good guy’s stuff: Superman Returns, Iron Man, Incredible Hulk

• Pros: Ironic. Fairly streamlined.
• Cons: Even worse than the previous category, because now the hero deserves blame for leaving his stuff around. The villainy results from his negligence.

Hero flat-out creates the villain: Avengers 2, Green Lantern (his organization, anyway)

• Pros: It’s ironic, it’s painful, it speaks to our fears of power spinning out of control.
• Cons: So many! Not only is every death in the movie is the fault of the hero, but each of those deaths has to be subtracted from the tally of lives saved in all the other movies featuring that hero! (There’s a reason why the body count in Avengers 2 was so low!)

Okay, so let’s look at the super-villains’ plans, pro and con:

Street crime: Daredevil movies and TV, most Batman movies 

• Pros: We all understand it. It’s an independent threat that would have happened anyway, so the hero is really a hero for stopping it.
• Cons: It has to be big enough to justify super-hero-ing, or else it will make the decision to put on a costume seem really weird.

Big evil plan that has nothing to do with the hero: Superman, Spider-Man 2, Captain America 2, Iron Man 3

• Pros: The hero is in the clear morally, and he has a fun mystery to solve.
• Cons: It requires a bit more plotting, but there’s very little downside. This is the way to do it. There’s a reason that those are four of the best.

Just attacking the hero, civilians get in the way: Spider-Man 1, X2, Man of Steel, Dark Knight Rises, Thor, Fantastic Four, Iron Man 2

• Pros: Much easier to write. The heroes don’t have to go on patrol, or track anybody down, or summon up any motivation—they just have to defend themselves against the enemies who show up on their doorstep.
• Cons: They aren’t actually heroes anymore. In fact, they’re just the opposite: they’re needlessly endangering civilians just by being around them.

I never understood why the villains were doing what they were doing: The Avengers, Dark Knight Rises, Thor 2

• Pros: If you move fast enough, audiences won’t care!
• Cons: And hour later, they’ll say “Wait…What??”

Ultimately, super-villains have to be the flip side of the hero on some thematic level, but if they have the same origin, or it’s just a grudge match, then you’ve lost the “hero” part. As I said before, action movies require civilians…and ideally those should be civilians that the hero didn’t personally endanger!

Obviously, this was one of the biggest problems with Avengers 2, but to a certain extent that was by design: it helps that this is the middle movie in a trilogy, and it’s clearly supposed to be a low-point. Still, it would have been better if Tony Stank had suffered real consequences and/or guilt for causing all this evil, instead of the car-commercial final scene he had.  Presumably, the consequences will hit later.