The Punisher, Frank Castle, began as a Spider-Man antagonist. I don’t think this is secret knowledge. If anything, it’s one of the key issues of Amazing Spider-Man. The kind that people slab and grade. The kind of issue whose cover gets homages in other comic runs twenty years down the line. This is not unknown information.
But I don’t know that we ever think about.
And The Punisher, in particular, is a very interesting case, because while you’d be remiss to call him a “villain” in traditional sense, he has been a secondary antagonist to other characters a number of times. He sort of appears when you need to put the hero up against a foe with something a little more ethically complicated than just your standard villain. Someone they can maybe team up with later.
It took him some time to get his own solo series, but he still gained popularity pretty quickly. There was something appealing enough about his anti-hero qualities. And he’s, by far, not the only comic character whose first appearance is in an antagonistic or semi-antagonistic role. Wolverine first appeared as a someone for The Hulk to fight. Deadpool was an antagonist for the New Mutants.
Cloak and Dagger, while also never villains, first appeared on page in opposition to, again, Spider-Man. That was more of a “please don’t murder those drug dealers” kind of conflict, but they’re still at cross-odds. They were still introduced as a problem that Spider-Man needed to solve, to some degree.
On the DC side we see similar transitions in characters like Ravager, Huntress, and Plastic Man. Harley Quinn has undergone several major shifts across both comics and adapted media since her introduction.
Then we have the entirety of the Suicide Squad and Creature Commandos and certain eras of the Thunderbolts that act less as a villain to hero transition, and more of a reconceptualization of what a “hero” actually is. The whole Krakoa era of X-Men saw a huge turn-over in the villain-hero dichotomy.
Then we have a whole host of characters that jump rope with that line between hero and villain, taking on whatever role makes the most sense in that era of editorial. Venom is one my personal specialties in this regard. Even though he’s been pretty solidly in the anti-hero camp for more than a decade, they really moved him around into a lot of weird positions in the first half of the character’s life.
But then let’s look at a character like Kraven, particularly the movie that came out late 2024. Now, when it comes to that set of Spider-Man IP movies from Sony, it is so hard to have an intelligent, nuanced conversation with good-faith critical analysis. The whole fandom is caught in a bit of an ouroboros of toxicity. But a question presented in a lot of the discussions is “who would want a B-tier Spider-Man villain movie?”
Now, I take umbrage with the idea of Kraven being “B-tier,” but that seems to be a relatively common feeling among the Spider-Man community I’ve interacted with. Whatever. No accounting for taste.
But Kraven is actually a really interesting character to examine for this kind of hypothetical. Because he never made that full transition into hero from villain, more just became less of a villain. Found a weird middle ground that had a lick of redemption in it that never really fully turned over. But he also has a really complex back story and life outside of his relationship with Spider-Man. If you were wanting to reimagine this character as a protagonist, there’s a lot of information to work with.
Which is what Kraven did. Personal opinions of the movie aside, it accomplished that goal, narratively.
This, in turn, raises a few very interesting questions if we’re attempting to analyze the relationship between audience and media. All other things being equal with this franchise, how much does it being a “villain movie” actually affect the desirability of the film at a conceptual level? Is it a fallback critique in lieu of one specific to the movie because they won’t ever actually see it? In a completely different set of circumstances, would a movie rehabilitating a classic villain have at least piqued curiosity?
Is it simply this particular villain? Is it this fandom?
If we look at something like Wicked, in all the iterations (book to stage musical to movie) at no point was there any particular outcry over the premise. Providing an alternative history of the Wicked Witch of the West and her relationship with Galinda/Glinda has been consistently praised for its creativity and narrative innovation. But then was does the Wizard of Oz fandom look like? What did it look like at the time? In modern terms, it’s small and more literary in nature with no ongoing changes.
Maleficent got middling critical reviews but had generally positive audience responses. Enough for a sequel to seem profitable. Cruella was reviewed much much higher overall, but saw a wider gap between critical and audience opinions. There are quite a number of romance novels that reimagine certain male Disney villains as love interests. At a high level, audiences respond positively to re-imaginings of villains of a certain ilk.
Now it is that “certain ilk” that is a factor in this equation. Because a character like Maleficent, even when viewed in the source material, is a compelling character with a lot of mystery attached. Why was she not invited to this party? Hell, I might curse a baby, too, if I was snubbed by an entire kingdom. She’s easy to see yourself in, even as a villain. Then the narrative they built around her for her solo work relied heavily on female rage and surviving trauma as central themes. That struck a chord with the Disney demographic. The character Hook (and inspired archetypes) also plays extremely heavily in the villain-turned-romantic interest field. Part of it’s because he falls into certain parameters of attractive in most of his depictions, but then he’s also a very “soft” villain. His acts of evil don’t escape child-appropriate levels of menace. So it’s easy to, intellectually, rehabilitate him into a misunderstood anti-hero.
If we do draw back into the comic book fandom, shows like Penguin and Gotham and the movie Joker center these incredibly vicious villains as their primary protagonists. And, with the exception of Folie a Deux, the fandom has responded with nothing but positivity.
If we narrow in to Spider-Man, again, we have the first Venom movie from 2018 to compare to. It had great box office numbers that blew through the expectations. Critics rated it on the lower end, but audience response at the time was a solid B in most areas. It fostered the SymBrock shipping community, so that group tends to view all three movies very positively. While the rest of the fan community has retro-actively lumped the entire trilogy into “those shitty Sony villain movies.”
So we have this underlying confluence of variables. Studio reputation, extra-fandom familiarity with the character, intra-fandom opinions of the character, and overall perceived quality of the media. So in a sort of media environment where we regularly undergo this transformation, which of these underlying aspects is the strongest indicator for success or a lack thereof with any given re-imagining, particularly at the hypothetical level?
Pixels and Pins Studio 