Keaton plays the man as weary and resentful, wanting to take his anger out on the world - and Adrian doesn’t even know yet that his arch-nemesis is dating his daughter. The MCU has notoriously featured some weak villains, but Homecoming was one of the happy exceptions, pitting Tom Holland’s sweet, geeky Peter Parker against Adrian, a hard-working guy who loses his business thanks to Tony Stark. In 2017, he was the Vulture, a Spider-Man bad guy. A few decades before, he was Batman, one of the biggest DC heroes, helping to popularize superhero cinema.
The recent Michael Keaton renaissance - he was excellent in Birdman and Spotlight - continued with this superb performance, which was all the juicier because of how it represented the actor coming full circle. (And spoiler alert: We will be talking about the “surprise” baddie in Far From Home.) None of them will ever make you consider rooting against Peter Parker. Here, a ranking of the 12 villains from the eight Spider-Man films made so far, including this week’s Spider-Man: Far From Home. But in the end, they’re beating up on a kid. That’s no offense to some of the excellent actors who have battled Spidey. It’s tough to find one, and it’s a reason that, throughout a few iterations of Spider-Man films, the villains just don’t stand out like they do in many other superhero movies.
But how do you play off a Queens teenager? Who’s his natural flip side? The best villains are natural reciprocals of the heroes they battle: The Joker and Batman are two halves of the same coin, cursed to battle forever, and Lex Luthor represents the last vestige of human ingenuity trying to take out the all-powerful alien who reminds us of our own weaknesses. None of the bad guys in Spider-Man comics has ever come close to the cultural cachet of those villains. Spider-Man’s foes have never been the focus of the Spider-Man films in a way that the Joker or Lex Luthor or even Thanos has been in other superhero movies. Photo: Vulture and Sony Pictures Releasing