Who's the next Thanos? Ranking Marvel's 12 candidates for the next big super villain

Marvel has no shortage of Big Bad Villains in the comics. Let's look at who might be next.

WARNING: This article features spoilers from Avengers: Endgame and WandaVision. If you haven’t gotten to that point in the Marvel timeline and you want to avoid spoilers, then you should get out of this article. And do it now. Or else you’ll learn stuff you don’t want to learn. So…. this is you last chance.

Marvel is just getting started with Phase 4, the post-Thanos era. The Avengers’ top leadership is gone: Iron Man, Captain America and Black Widow. There’s a massive vacuum of superstars in the Marvel universe — with both good and evil taking major losses.

It doesn’t seem like the good guys will be lacking in talent for long. Marvel has a handful of movies on the horizon to build upon characters from the previous generation of Avengers (like Antman and Dr. Strange) while building out new storylines for up-and-comers (like Shang-Chi and the Eternals). But we don’t quite know who will be the next Big Bad in the absence of Thanos. It’s likely to take a while to find out. Still, we figured we’d dive into some of the top candidates. Here are 12 options.