20 villain comebacks, ranked from pandering to satisfying

That iconic and easily marketable antagonist you already feel strong emotions about is back! A bad guy in fiction has a shorter shelf life than a hero, as forces of antagonism are fueled by an opposing need to stop them. You can’t keep an evil scheme going on forever, otherwise there would be no stakes, giving creators a finite time to milk an entertaining villain before their threatening presence has been sapped of energy. This means it’s difficult to not be cynical about villain comebacks in film and TV; it’s often a case of having your cake (giving the protagonist a formidable obstacle) and eating it too (leaning on proven, established character dynamics).

Before Vengeance Most Fowl, the combined length of Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit adventures was three hours and 16 minutes—that is to say, the British animation studio couldn’t fairly be accused of milking a property that could be watched in its entirety over an afternoon. The return of master criminal Feathers McGraw, a penguin disguised as a chicken in The Wrong Trousers, gets away with its cheeky nostalgia pandering. McGraw ranks alongside Shaun The Sheep as the most popular secondary character in the franchise. Aardman has never been shy of genre pastiche, and in his menacing return to our screens, McGraw climbs back on top like an imprisoned killer baying for the blood of his apprehenders. To see how Feathers compares to other villainous returns, be they earned or unearned, we’ve compiled a list of 20 villain comebacks, ranked from transparently pandering to rousingly satisfying.

Some housekeeping: To qualify for this list, a villain must be returning after an on-screen defeat earlier in their film or TV series’ canon. Villains who were defeated and returned to aid our heroes, à la Captain Barbossa or Magneto, are disqualified, because their return makes for a fundamentally different dramatic force in the story. Because this list is surveying the legitimate and hackneyed ways that a villain is brought back in a follow-up, we’re not including Big Bads who were defeated at some point before our story begins—because we only see Voldemort and Sauron’s reigns of terror in flashbacks, you won’t find them here.

20. Moriarty, Sherlock

This quasi-resurrection is locked into last place because it was just that insincere and mangled an attempt to recapture past glories. Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) defeated his archrival Moriarty (Andrew Scott, in a star-making performance) on the thinnest technicality at the end of the reimagined BBC series’ second season, but Scott was back playing imagined and recorded versions of Moriarty in the very next episode. This led to a barely sustained mystery about his ability to speak from beyond the grave. By the end of the show’s unwatchable fourth season, the allure of Moriarty had been saturated with red herrings and fake outs—it would have been far less implausible and exhausting if he had actually arisen from the dead.

19. Palpatine, Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker

There’s about two dozen ways that The Rise Of Skywalker does not acceptably function as narrative cinema, but the funniest one is the much-memed line “Somehow Palpatine returned,” delivered by an actor who looks like he’s trying to Force-project his way out of the scene, out of the movie, out of his contract. The evil Emperor’s abrupt return in the trilogy-ender felt so cheap and incongruous because, thus far, the sequels had played it smart with their legacy moments—original characters took priority over the old cast, who were given surprising and complete story arcs to justify their presence. The Emperor is such a menacing presence in Return Of The Jedi because only one of our heroes ever meets him—he’s cloistered in a dark, silent sanctuary overlooking the wars and rebellions waged in his name. His return makes him a god-king on a planet we never knew existed, and he has to be defeated by characters who suddenly have the same awareness of canon as modern Star Wars fans.

18. Gozer, Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Post-pandemic, former indie prodigy Jason Reitman has been on a legacy sequel kick, even considering that his films are inextricable from his own legacy as Ivan Reitman’s son. Leaving aside the strangeness of making back-to-back films starring Dan Aykroyd and then an actor playing Dan Aykroyd, this self-serious Ghostbusters sequel brought back Gozer, the goddess of death from the 1984 film (now played by Olivia Wilde), after she was banished into the Ghost Dimension 40 years prior. While Gil Kenan’s follow-up Frozen Empire marked a move away from legacy villains, it doesn’t affect how depressingly inevitable the return of the first film’s Big Bad feels in this sentimental retread of the Spengler family’s journey. This comeback is less idiotic as it is insignificant—any investment in Gozer’s return is drowned out by realizing how much we’re being pandered to.

17. Dr. Alexander Isaacs, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

It’s difficult to find the right spot for the return of Alexander Isaacs in Paul W.S. Anderson’s final Resident Evil film: there’s no doubt it’s an unearned callback to the moment in the mid-2000s that the series could be called “culturally relevant,” but six movies into Milla Jovovich’s undead-slaying, reality-warping antics, audiences are unlikely to be seriously bothered by cheap, improbable narrative design. Last we saw the Umbrella Corporation leader, he transformed into a mutated “Tyrant” and tried to kill Alice—in The Final Chapter, well, he’s doing much the same thing, but he also reveals the truth behind Alice’s identity in an underground chamber with loyal henchman Albert Wesker, hologram child the Red Queen, and Jovovich in old-age makeup. Truly, the gang’s all here.

16. All the foes in Spider-Man: No Way Home

It’s not worth making separate entries for the five Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield-era Spider-Man villains that multiversally show up in No Way Home, not least because only a couple of them are given a gesture of characterization. After the initial surprise of seeing Actors We Know In Costumes We Recognize, there’s startlingly little for them to do, especially after former Spider-Men turn up to support Tom Holland’s Peter Parker trying to medically cure their misunderstood villains of their megalomaniacal impulses. Three years on, the novelty of No Way Home’s confectionary construction has worn off, and even though it still stands as the most satisfying live-action legacy crossover, it’s clear that chasing down actors who might otherwise be doing middlebrow dramas and the occasional Comic-Con panel is not a serious, sturdy, or smart way to build a $200 million movie.

15. The Master, Doctor Who

It’s perhaps cheating to pick a single comeback for a character who A) is a shape-shifting alien and B) has spent his television career coming back after being resoundingly defeated, but we’re not focusing any of the instances where the Doctor’s Time Lord nemesis regenerated into a new actor, nor any of the winking comebacks he made during the classic ‘70s-’80s era of the show. When John Simm’s version of the character unambiguously chose to die in the Doctor’s arms in Season 3 of the revived series, it was a source of real, confronting pathos for our hero—over three episodes. He found and lost his only other family in the universe, and cruel fate decreed that his fellow survivor had to be defeated. When an arcane ritual brought back Simm as a cackling, hair-dyed, glowing-skeleton madman in David Tennant’s farewell special, the problem was less the implausible comeback from certain death, but that the terms of the Master’s goodbye were so emotionally potent that showrunner Russell T. Davies should have just waited for his successor Steven Moffat to resurrect the character with actress Michelle Gomez.

14. Michael Myers, Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers

We’ve reached the first and worst iconic slasher villain coming back from the (presumed) dead. Because Michael Myers is ostensibly a real guy—or at least, a depiction of how humanity is perverted when a person nurtures evil in their soul—his resurrections in slapdash sequels is a touch more annoying than, say, Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. After a hospital explosion purportedly claimed his life in Halloween II, Michael has actually been comatose, but wakes up when he hears he has a niece in Haddonfield. There’s nothing wrong with Michael Myers making an unexpected comeback (arguably, he is most famous for sitting back up after Laurie Strode thinks he’s dead), but the fact that John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s vision of a spooky anthology were scuppered post-Season Of The Witch makes his return here a kick in the teeth.

13. Freddy Krueger, A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

The problem with A Nightmare On Elm Street is that Freddy Krueger is kind of unkillable, but movies need narrative stakes, so our teenage characters must try to defeat him in every film. In the previous installment, Krueger’s bones are properly laid to rest, killing his demonic form, but Dream Master reverses this with a dog urinating on his grave, which turns into unholy flame and pulls Krueger back to our world. To make it clear, we have no issue with this. The propulsive, fatalistic edge that Freddy Krueger has as a killer—mutating reality, feeding victims into ironic and fantastical death traps—has worn off by the fourth entry. One remaining anxiety-inducing ace up Freddy’s sleeve, though, is his inability to die: In order for a creature to die, one has to understand its relationship to life, an explanation that Elm Street always wriggles out of giving. Near the midpoint of this list, this one is an intriguing contradiction: a villain comeback that’s both stupid and satisfying.

12. Melisha Tweedy, Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget

Aardman’s long-overdue sequel to Chicken Run disappointed where Vengeance Most Fowl delighted, but the return of Mrs. Tweedy, the former owner of a chicken farm that felt eerily like a WWII POW camp, was one of its stronger elements. Building on the first film’s environmental message, Dawn Of The Nugget gives the sadistic villain a new dastardly plan:  mind-controlling chickens into blank, docile bliss, because happy and calm chickens make for better food. Now sporting severe eye-shadow and a high hair bun, Tweedy completes her transformation into James Bond villainess, pushed over the edge by realizing her prey are capable of advanced intelligence.

11. Megatron, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, Transformers: Age Of Extinction

Yes, Megatron came back from the dead twice over the five films in Michael Bay’s derided blockbuster series—rescued first from the bottom of the ocean, and then reincarnated inside a laboratory. There’s no meaningful threat of death for the robots in these films—anyone can be rebuilt, repurposed with an evil code, or revived with a mechanical MacGuffin. As each film tries to one-up its predecessor, Megatron is sidelined in favor of a more ancient robot (voiced by either Tony Todd, Leonard Nimoy, or Gemma Chan). There may be no tension whenever Megatron makes a repeat appearance, but you do have to admire his persistence; popping up whenever Optimus Prime needs to battle a graver evil to be as large a pain in the backside as possible is petty in a way us non-shapeshifting robots can only dream of.

10. Prince Charming, Shrek The Third

Prince Charming went from riches to rags between Shrek 2 and the inferior Shrek The Third, but the highlight of the threequel is watching the tempestuous brat’s return to villainy after his mother (the Fairy Godmother) was defeated in Shrek 2. Voiced deliciously by Rupert Everett, Charming is bitter and unmoored in the backwaters of Far Far Away before mounting a coup and taking the throne. He stages a revisionist theatrical account of his heroics that includes a real execution of Shrek. No longer a pawn in his mother’s scheme, Charming’s comeback is imprecise, obvious, and bombastic; while his mother was a skilled dramatist who weaved misdirection and metamorphosis into her royal plot, Charming relies only on his powers as an actor: oration and bravado.

9. Jafar, The Return Of Jafar

This is not to argue that Disney’s first direct-to-video animated sequel features a genuinely satisfying arc for the evil Aladdin magician, but it is perhaps the quintessential use of the trope in popular culture. Not many people have watched the film outside of the uncritical realm of childhood, but the title has been deployed in a memetic fashion to indicate a blatantly below-par or unwanted sequel, in the same manner as Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo or 2 Fast 2 Furious. As happened with Megatron, Freddy Krueger, and Palpatine, The Return Of Jafar acknowledges that, within the parameters of fiction, you can make any decision you want, and the only thing holding studios back from undermining their own artistic integrity is the belief that it’s something worth protecting—this is Michael Eisner’s Disney, baby! Much like his tomb in the genie’s lamp, Jafar’s return was mercifully restricted to the insides of a video cassette tape.

8. Jason Voorhees, Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

The resurrection of Jason Voorhees is ranked above Michael and Freddy’s not simply because Jason Lives is a better film, but because it’s the best in an iconic franchise that’s low on outright wins. When Jason was killed off in The Final Chapter, the slasher genre had already begun its decline, but the relative lack of competition in 1986 meant Jason Lives could expand its comedic horizons and cement Jason as a god among slasher killers. Slammed with a bolt of lightning, Jason rises from the grave like Frankenstein’s monster to do the exact same thing. Props to him for his consistency. Despite coming back because the previous installment without him flopped (just like Halloween) and the fact that the series already operated on the tacit understanding that he could never truly die (just like Elm Street), Jason Lives is too triumphant to deny.

7. Feathers McGraw, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

This calculated criminal mastermind feels like a cold noir villain who’s been smuggled into a cozy, clever comedy. Feathers McGraw waddles in the footsteps of Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers and Ivor Novello in The Lodger. In the Oscar-winning short The Wrong Trousers, the jewel thief (disguised as a chicken) lodges at 62 West Wallaby Street, driving a rift between man and dog. 31 years later, he’s back to claim the diamond he was denied, and to ruin Wallace’s reputation in the process. Feathers’ comeback satisfies largely because he spends most of his screen time training and plotting in isolation—directors Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham bring us close to the Wallace-hating fiend to read the stewing indignation and resentment on his expressionless, beady-eyed face. The cute dimensions of the claymation penguin are comically undermined by the totalic dread the film summons in his company—to the twisted mind of Feathers McGraw, revenge is an urge that cannot be sated, fuel to an already raging fire.

6. John Kreese, Cobra Kai

It’s difficult to be too critical about the nostalgia baiting of The Karate Kid that’s happened since Cobra Kai first debuted on YouTube Red in 2018—it’s not like the hokey, kid-friendly ‘80s trilogy was above easy, commercial sentimentality. If anything, the six-season streaming series (the final episodes drop February 2025) has legitimized the increasingly dubious continuations of the 1984 smash hit—one-note characters like the demented dojo sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove) get Vietnam flashbacks, season-long villain arcs, and a whole prison escape across his 56-episode run. The amount of major and minor characters who reprise their Karate Kid roles in Cobra Kai is getting ridiculous, but Kreese’s sheer commitment to clawing back power before being proverbially pinned to the mat (often in the form of getting teens to do martial arts) makes his elongated comeback far more substantial and gripping than it has any right to be.

5. Ivan Drago, Creed II

Congratulations for reaching the portion of the list dubbed “The True Hater Zone.” With one exception, this top five consists of villains motivated by bruised egos and fiery resentment—their grievances transcend pettiness and often cross metaphysical boundaries. Ivan Drago acted as a distorted Iron Curtain mirror to Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV, but his defeat in 1985 made him a persona non grata in the waning Soviet Union. In Creed II, he sees his son Viktor as his only path to redemption, and pits him against Adonis Creed in the ring. The match is personal for many reasons (Ivan killed Adonis’ father Apollo in Rocky IV), not least because Ivan comes to realize that he’s not just using Viktor as a proxy weapon against those who slighted him, but also as a human shield, letting him weather punches in order to serve his bitter, slightly self-loathing hater agenda. The Creed series understands that, like Rocky, it’s a series about men being emotional, and when it clicks for a ringside Ivan that he’s burdened his son with his own pain, he throws in the towel on Viktor’s behalf, ending a comeback with his son buried in a long-overdue embrace.

4. Miles Quaritch, Avatar: The Way Of Water

Miles Quaritch is dead; long live Miles Quaritch. The marine colonel arrived on Pandora in Avatar to clear the way for the megacorporation after the planet’s resources, but was defeated by Neytiri. In The Way Of Water, Quaritch was resurrected as a “Recombinant,” a Na’vi Avatar hosting his consciousness, memories, and insatiable hunger for Jake Sully’s blood. The complicated dynamics of colonial outsiders using Avatars to inhabit the physical form and abilities of an Indigenous people is pushed to extremes with Recom Quaritch—a full perversion of Na’vi spirituality, disconnected from their culture and social bonds, instead focused solely on power. Uncovering your own human skull and crushing it to bone dust cuts to the heart of Quaritch’s comeback: a relentless acceleration of force.

3. Khan Noonien Singh, Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan

While Khan meets the criteria of a villain who made a vengeful return after an on-screen defeat earlier in their franchise’s canon, his Moby Dick-infused revenge story was the first time he appeared on film—Ricardo Montalbán reprised his role from the Star Trek TV episode “Space Seed.” Exiled with his followers to the uncolonized planet Ceti Alpha V, The Wrath Of Khan finds the charismatic leader hellbent on seizing power from Captain Kirk after his new planet became uninhabitable. It’s often pointed out that Khan and Kirk never share the screen throughout the tense, peerless space adventure film, but the distance between the control bridges of their respective starships feels central to Khan’s eventual defeat (albeit a costly one, with Spock sacrificing his life). Khan is forever chasing an image of Kirk, closer to his enemy than during his exile, but further than he was in “Space Seed.” The fanatical nature of Khan’s comeback may have gotten him further than other vengeful foes on this list, but the fact that he did it, to quote both Khan and Captain Ahab, “for hate’s sake” blinded him from his enemies’ pragmatic and logical countermeasures.

2. Frankenstein’s Monster, The Bride Of Frankenstein

Categorizing Frankenstein’s monster as a villain does a disservice to the sensitivity of James Whale’s Gothic interpretation of Mary Shelley’s novel, but there’s no denying that the stitched flesh and lumpy proportions of the creature became monster movie iconography in the near-century of horror that followed. At the end of Frankenstein, it seems the monosyllabic monolith died in a terrific windmill fire—but he emerges in The Bride Of Frankenstein even more lost and alone than before. This comeback is one for the history books because the human mob pursuing the Monster is more responsible for his villainous reputation than his actual actions, and when his sincere but ill-fated demand for companionship falls apart almost immediately, it feels less like a comforting return to normality but rather a sober reminder that the world sees the happiness of such outsiders as a profoundly dangerous thing.

1. Agent Smith, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Resurrections

How do you kill an AI program embedded deep in the code of a titanic machine? As The Matrix Reloaded informs us, you can’t. The snarling, smooth tones of Agent Smith return as a renegade program linked to Neo after he “deletes” him in the first film’s climax. An AWOL Smith is a terrifying existential concept for the sequels, but makes for a deliciously unhinged character. Actor Hugo Weaving grows more elastic and expressive as the character overrides the code, DNA, and consciousness of countless beings. When Smith returns in The Matrix Resurrections, he has to be awoken—living in the shell of Neo’s business partner, stripped of his copying powers but burdened with a romantic view of his bond with his messianic archrival. Smith’s multiple comebacks remain unparalleled because his original appearance as the leader of a strict, ordered bureaucracy of Matrix cops is completely transformed in subsequent appearances. He is increasingly defined by the person who destroyed him, but possesses the ability to question that relationship with a playful, if unstable critical mind. When he mounts a comeback, he’s smarter and more insane.