Supervillain mathematics

@MikeSanderson09 & oOLaterDazeOo - thanks guys!

And i agree with you about GL, oOLaterDazeOo.

I think CBMs use 2 villains regularly, unless necessary to have more.

Just one villain. A polar opposite to the Hero that has more time to be developed and fleshed out than multiple adversaries.

In Green Lantern, parralax and hammond are the villains with sinestro being a good guy at first. Parallax is treated as being more of a force of nature rather than a villain with any kind of arc or emotion. it's more of hammonds origin as a villain and he's the final antoginist.

Samad, with CBMs in general the sequels have upped the quality! X-Men 2, Spider-man 2, TDK(arguable), Superman 2, FF 2(yeah I know still crap but better than the first). Hellboy 2. Only Iron Man 2 really failed to outdo its predecessor for me.

As for the villain thing, well its really not rocket science, more characters mean more time needed to spend to develop em properly. Some directors struggle with this, a select view thrive on it. But any time you have a studio putting pressure on to keep a running time down and your juggling all these characters needing satisfactory resolutions, its gonna come to a head. TDK had nearly 3 hours to work with remember, and even that wasn't entirely successful with DEnt.

Nice work Hela. In my opinion, I don't believe it is the number of villains that are in the film but how they interact with the story and characters. As mentioned, 'the Dark Knight' as well as 'Batman Begins' had more than one villain, or even more than 3. Both films still managed to maintain a good story structure because the villains/characters that were in those features played a minor/vitol role in the story. They fitted in with what was going on, to be exact. From one person's opinion towards 'Iron Man 2,' he or she thought that Justin's character really didn't do much and was just there most of the time while 'Whiplash' did the damage. I think, looking back, that Justin only served as a type of rival to Tony who's pay-off or big 'attack' was during the third act where the 'Iron Men' started running rampant. Though he really didn't count as a bad guy because he just wanted to outdo Stark's tech and didn't want anyone hurt. If you look back at 'Spider-Man 3' the problem was that the villains (Sandman, Venom, 'New Goblin') didn't have anything in common with what was going on in the story. Supposedly this film was about Peter's morals and everything he believed in being challenged by an outside force; the symbiote being the perfect adversary for this theme. Had Raimi decided to shelve Sandman and Harry's bad-guy sports wear like he did with Vulture then the story could've had a more emotional and psychological basis to it. 'The Dark Knight' the Joker and Two-Face were used because the Joker was the one who brought escalation upon Gotham and Harvey's transformation was the collateral of that escalation. You can do more than one villain in one film so long as you give them enough room to breath in. Trying to give every character an origin story won't work and will either make the film too long or take the focus away from who the film is supposed to be about. The Sinister Six will work under these two conditions:

- The members would have had to have been introduced in the previous installments.

- With/without an origin story, the character must play a vital role in what is occuring in the story.

It can work, it just takes clever writing, architecture and thinking. Nice work by the way. :)

Usually when constructing the cast of characters for any film you work out who your main character is.

You then go to town defining, shaping and creating all the aspects of this character.

Finally you create all the supporting characters who should challenge and come into conflict with all these different aspects.

When putting villains (or anyone else for that matter)into a CBM you're usually looking for a story that connects with different aspects of the main character.

Batman Begins is a perfect example of it. Batman is your main guy. Aspects include attitude to vigilantism (Rha's al Ghul) Fear (scarecrow) to organised crime (Falcone and Gordon) Family (Alfred) Technology (Fox) The Law (Dawes), etc

Is not a question of 'how many' but 'do I need them'. But it is true, the more eggs you try and juggle the harder it becomes to make it work.

You left out "Batman Returns."

I agree that the X-Men films are exception. "X2" could be perceived as having numerous villains. Yes, Magneto and company were allies, but Pyro was crossing over. Nightcrawler was momentarily bad. It wasn't Stryker alone.

Overall, I agree. It is still about quality. The Nolan Batmans have had two in each. He just crafts them well without having competitive screen time amongst them.

It is really about the script and the direction.