The MCU has had an escalation problem since the original version of Thanos turned to the camera in The Avengers‘ post-credit scene and grinned. Since that moment, Marvel Studios’ flagship franchise has pushed the envelope, raised the bar, and sought superlatives like no one’s business.
Audiences want the best big villain, the next god-tier hero, and the next world-ending threat. Or at least that’s what the studio believes. The issue, of course, is that constantly rewriting the MCU’s power hierarchy comes at a cost to dramatic tension. If the villain is immortal, you’ve already lost before you start; and if the heroes are all unbeatable, where are the actual stakes?
The answer for Marvel has always lain in nerfing powerful characters, or introducing loopholes or narrative limitations on their powers. Vision becoming more human stopped him being a god; Scarlet Witch’s trauma limited her ascendance (at least at first); and Sentry came with a ready-made loophole. Even half-Celestial Star-Lord gave up the most powerful part of him. But they at least all got to show off their full power potential.
Other MCU characters arguably never made it to that top level: their screen versions are fundamentally limited in comparison to the versions we saw in Marvel comics. And there are some seriously big names who fit the bracket…
Calling the MCU’s God of Thunder weak would be a little silly, given his arrival in Avengers: Infinity War is heralded by the other Avengers as a game-changing moment. And he does come close to taking down the Mad Titan (and then is the one to remove his head in Endgame), but he’s still nowhere near the level he achieves in the comics. Even when he withstands the full force of a dying star in Nidavellir.
In Marvel Comics, Thor operates on an entirely different cosmic tier. He has, at times, been vulnerable, of course, but his top power level, backed by the Almighty Thor-Force is near-unrivaled in all Marvel lore. He can be as fast as Silver Surfer, strong enough to lift more than 100 tonnes, and basically reaches omnipotence in several of his forms, including Rune King Thor and Cosmic King Thor. Having someone that powerful in the MCU would be a cheat code, so Chris Hemsworth’s hero was slapped down with hubris, mental vulnerability, and a lower ceiling to keep things fair.
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MCU movie audiences know Dave Bautista’s Drax as one of the funniest Guardians of the Galaxy characters thanks to his fatally literal read on life and seemingly limited intelligence. It’s a great take on the character, admittedly, but it meant the true potential of the muscle-bound, rage-filled Kylosian was never achieved in his movie appearances.
In the comics, Drax is a cosmic-powered anti-Thanos weapon who begins life as a human called Arthur Douglas, whose soul is placed in a superpowered body by the entity known as Kronos to be his champion. His powers in his original form included the ability to shoot cosmic energy beams and telepathy, and the trick that he actually gets more powerful the closer he gets to Thanos. None of that made it to the movies, and he was instead turned into a grieving father whose personal link to a Thanos was downplayed as time passed.
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The Grandmaster
Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster in Thor: Ragnarok is an absolute delight; he’s an eccentric, disarmingly charming malevolent, who rules like a despotic Roman emperor, deranged by the crowd’s love of him. He sits at the top of a greed-driven hierarchy and controls his subjects through a mix of brutality and mindless entertainment. What he isn’t, is a warrior of any sort. He appears to have simply stolen his power through exploitation.
But in the comics, The Grandmaster is one of the Elders of the Universe – alongside his The Collector (Benicio Del Toro in the MCU who was confirmed to be his brother off-screen) – made of the same energy that created the cosmos. He’s basically immortal, invulnerable, and possesses a raft of cosmic powers that the MCU simply left out, including teleportation, matter manipulation, and the power to resurrect the dead. Not as funny as Goldblum, though.
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Adam Warlock
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Introduced in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Will Poulter’s Adam Warlock is a child-brained Rocky Horror, created by the Sovereign’s leader, Ayesha, as her personal weapon. He’s certainly powerful, overcoming the Guardians in their first meeting and saving Peter Quill in the finale from certain death, but he’s a shadow of his comic book self.
In the comics, Warlock is basically the Marvel Universe’s cosmic skeleton key, because his defining power is resurrection and every time he’s been brought back, he’s had wildly different powers. The only consistent thing is that he’s always ridiculously powerful, and basically a god who once wielded the Infinity Gauntlet. It’s a shame we never got to see him at full power in the MCU, but it would have created more problems than it fixed.
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Doctor Strange
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As with most of the most powerful MCU characters, Stephen Strange’s full potential was limited in his movie appearances because he’s just too powerful at full speed, and the creative teams decided that making him flawed and vulnerable (and prone to mistakes) makes him more of a dramatically rounded character. In the MCU, he’s not the Sorcerer Supreme, has been held back by his own hubris, and has caused some fairly serious multiversal issues because of his powers.
In the comics, though, Strange is far less restricted. His command of magic is second to none, and his invocation of ancient cosmic spells and entities is deemed not so much as impressive as it is routine. He’s a force of magical nature, completely removed from the warrior magician the MCU has turned Benedict Cumberbatch’s version into.
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Samuel Sterns AKA The Leader
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Years after he was initially teased at the end of The Incredible Hulk, Tim Blake Nelson’s Samuel Sterns finally reappeared as the villainous mastermind behind Captain America: Brave New World. He was presented as the genius-level threat behind General Ross’ ill-gotten rise to power, as well as the creator of the Red Hulk, and in a weird twist, Brave New World‘s post-credits scene suggested he had some sort of ability to see the future based on probability. Nonsense, of course, but a fun way to nod towards Doomsday that was plucked out of someone’s back pocket.
The comic version of Sterns – better known as The Leader is far more than just a really smart guy with a weird head. His massively enlarged brain gives him actual telepathy powers, as well as mind control, telekinesis, and the ability to manipulate gamma energy. In the Immortal Hulk arc, he stepped up even further into an unthinkable horror, but even at his baseline, he’s way more impressive than the blunted version we ended up with in the MCU.
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Ever since he reappeared in The Avengers, Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner has been the poster boy for the MCU’s superpower shame. His arc featured constant warnings that we wouldn’t like him at his most powerful, and has seen the Hulk repeatedly manipulated by villains as a weapon. We now know Avengers: Doomsday will do the same. But at the same time, the MCU has tried very hard not to show him at full power, inventing new ways to limit the true Hulk’s screen time.
In the comics, Hulk’s strength is genuinely boundless and scales as he gets more angry – which the MCU has only really flirted with, because it scales directly with his rage. At his absolute peak, as World-Breaker Hulk, for instance, he’s a weapon of destruction capable of leveling entire planets with limited effort. He’s essentially immortal, which the MCU got right, and can go toe-to-toe with divine and cosmic beings easily. Simply put, he was too powerful for anyone in the MCU to unleash him in his purest form.
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In the MCU, Anthony Hopkins played Odin with the comfy reverence of an old king in the last days of his time on the throne, showing his need to have Odinsleep naps to regenerate and having him outsmarted and dethroned by Loki. The only hints to the full fury of his power lay in his achievements – he sat at the head of the Nine Realms after all (which it’s later revealed was the result of a bloody conquest) – and his ability to strip Thor of his powers entirely. Beyond that, he sits out most conflicts and, for some reason, wasn’t bothered by Thanos’ coming conquest.
In the comics, Odin is god. He’s a cosmic marvel, wielding the legendary Odinforce, and capable of near-unthinkable feats of power: destroying and fixing dimensions, stopping time, and basically acting like a one-man Infinity Gauntlet. In his full form, Odin was simply too overwhelming for the MCU, and with Thor’s story framed around his ascendancy to the throne of Asgard (and rejection of it), we were always going to get a version of his father on the downturn. It was still a shame, though.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a long-running multimedia franchise drawn from the heroes, villains, and narratives of Marvel Comics. The MCU formally began with 2008’s Iron Man, with other successes forming the basis for the contemporary path from comic page to screen, including over 30 films and 20 TV shows.
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