Who is the next big villain after ‘Avengers: Endgame’?

Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.

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Thanos is dead. Like, really dead.

But if the heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe were hoping that the end of Thanos would be the end of all their problems, they need to read some more comic books. There’s always another enemy.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get any big hints at who could be filling Thanos’s giant shoes after Avengers: Endgame, but there’s a handful of possibilities that are well-established in Marvel comics. 

Let’s break down a few of Marvel’s biggest, baddest villains that could threaten Earth, the galaxy, or even the universe at large.

Galactus

If we’re talking Big Bads, there aren’t really any beings in the universe bigger and badder than Galactus.

Galactus is a villain of cosmic proportions, literally. He was the first being to ever exist in the universe and his immense power allows him to pretty much do whatever he wants. He’s omniscient, can teleport, transmute anything, create life, destroy life, change his size, and release tremendous amounts of energy. He’s so powerful that most life in the universe can’t even perceive what he actually looks like, which is pretty Lovecraftian.

With all that power, Galactus requires a lot of fuel, which is where his villainy comes in. To sustain himself, Galactus consumes planets that harbor life. He eats planets and all the life that lives on them.

Galactus’s motive isn’t necessarily to cause cosmic genocide, but that’s what he does, and he can easily influence and manipulate other lifeforms to help him. He’s not an easy threat to handle.

M.O.D.O.K.

Regular man George Tarleton had his DNA messed with during experiments to make him more intelligent, turning him into Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing, also known as M.O.D.O.K.

M.O.D.O.K.’s head is huge, which corresponds with his super intelligence, and makes him quite the visually striking villain. Not only does he look like a sentient cube of meat, he floats around on a hoverchair equipped with all manner of weapons, and making him quite the formidable foe when paired with his smarts.

M.O.D.O.K.’s so smart that his brain basically works like a computer and he can pretty much predict future events by calculating different outcomes of events. Along with that, M.O.D.O.K. has telepathic powers, can control people, create force fields, and channel his brain power into a beam. 

Given his name, you can tell he loves killing. Murder brings M.O.D.O.K. joy, and with his advanced intelligence and ability to control people, he’s quite the formidable villain.

The Deviants

The Deviants, like the Eternals, are genetically modified off-shoots of the human race that were created by the Celestials about a million years ago.

That’s a lot of proper nouns that you may not know, so here’s a simple explanation: The Celestials are basically gods who visited Earth at the dawn of humanity and captured a bunch of early humans. Some of these humans were mutated and turned into Deviants (the bad guys) and some were altered into Eternals (the kind-of good guys).

Deviants have a wide array of mutations that can present themselves at birth, oftentimes making them superior to humans with classic things like super strength, super speed, super intelligence, and a handful of other possibilities. They’re kind of like snowflakes, in a way — each Deviant has their own unique mutations. Instead of celebrating those differences, though, they often hate them, which frequently causes infighting and makes them hostile toward other races, including humans.

Thanos was an Eternal and the only one who carried the Deviants gene, which should give you a decent idea of how Deviants behave.

Doctor Doom

Victor Von Doom is probably more a long-shot for the MCU considering his origin story is so closely tied with Richard Reed’s (Mr. Fantastic) and the Fantastic Four haven’t been established at all. But now that Disney has the rights to Fantastic Four, anything is possible.

Doctor Doom is a very horrible guy who is also a genius, which is a bad combination. With his technological prowess and magical abilities, Doom is quite the formidable foe. His hobbies include trying to conquer the world, becoming more powerful by any means necessary, doing war crimes, and fighting superheroes.

Thanks to his inventions and ties to magic, Doctor Doom can do pretty much whatever he wants and he’s almost impossible to stop. His armor is indestructible, he can teleport, summon demons, cast spells, trade minds with others, and he’s so smart that he’s pretty much impervious to mind control. He also likes to use Doombots that look and act just like him to do his bidding, often fooling people into thinking they’ve beaten him.

Although he’s primarily associated with the Fantastic Four, Doctor Doom is planet-level threat and he’s had plenty of run-ins with the Avengers and others.

Annihilus

A creature from the Negative Zone, Annihilus is an insect-like creature of immense power and boy does he love killing people.

Annihilus is from a race of aliens that begin their lives as spores, and thanks to some tried-and-true mutations he became an incredibly powerful leader of his insectoid people. He is one of the most powerful beings from the Negative Zone (an anti-matter alternate universe) and travels to the Positive Zone (the regular universe) to destroy — or annihilate — everything in his path.

Being an advanced insect creature, Annihilus has super strength and is basically impervious to harm. If he is harmed, though, his metabolism kicks in and he can heal himself rapidly. If Annihilus is killed, he is reborn as a clone of himself, like a gross little phoenix.

The threat of Annihilus is less about himself as an individual and more about the hordes of aliens he commands to tear through everything in his path. Not exactly an easy problem to take care of.

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There are so many other villains that could feasibly pop into the MCU over the next few years and with rumors flying about so many different projects on the horizon after Endgame, the possibilities are endless.

While these five would pose a similar threat to Thanos, there’s no saying the next Big Bad of the MCU couldn’t be a cabal of villains or something a little less universe-threatening. But we know Marvel loves drama, and to them, drama means entire planets on the brink of destruction.