However, this is nothing new with the MCU, and movies have had sympathetic villains for many years. In some cases, a misunderstood monster ends up hunted and forced to fight back and in others, a man faces injustice and takes matters into his own hands. In each case, the villain goes over the line and becomes a villain, but in the start, they were often the ones wronged.

Red

In Jordan Peele's Us, Lupita Nyong'o played two characters, wife and mother Addy and her evil doppelgänger, Red. In the movie, a group of doppelgängers based on Addy's entire family showed up and terrorized them at a vacation retreat. However, nothing was as it seemed.

A twist at the end of Us made Red the most sympathetic character in the entire movie. She was the real Addy, and the woman who grew up to get married and have kids was the actual doppelgänger, who abducted Addy and replaced her when she was a small child.

Candyman

Candyman would kill anyone who said his name five times in front of a mirror, regardless of who it was. However, his past history made him more sympathetic than other slasher killers of his era.

When he was alive, Candyman was Daniel Robitaille, a Black painter who had a romantic relationship with a white woman in the 19th-century Deep South. But because the relationship was considered forbidden back then, the men of the town brutally murdered him, leaving his tortured soul seeking vengeance.

Roy Batty

The movie director and star often had off-screen drama about what the true meaning behind the movie was. Ford was Rick Deckard, a Blade Runner who hunted down and eliminated renegade Replicants.

Rutger Hauer played Roy Batty, the Replicant that Deckard was hunting. What made him sympathetic is that he was one of many Replicants (androids created to serve) that wanted to be free. His only crime, at first, was wanting to live, and he turned bad when he realized society would never allow that.

Gollum

Gollum was an antagonist who both helped the heroes in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was also the one who stood in their way. However, the story of Gollum was tragic, and he was one of the most sympathetic characters in the entire saga.

Gollum was, at one point, known as Smeagol, tasked with keeping the ring safe. The ring corrupted Gollum, as it attempted to do to Frodo, and even though he wanted to remain loyal to Frodo, he had little chance thanks to his inability to resist the corruption.

Killmonger

Erik Killmonger was the most sympathetic MCU villain until the most recent phase saw a rise in the character type. He was just a child living with his dad when Black Panther's father T'Chaka showed up and killed him, leaving Eric an orphan.

The fact that Erik's dad was T'Chaka's brother and Erik was stripped of his rights as a Wakanda citizen, made his plight even more tragic. Killmonger had every reason to hate Wakanda and his cousin T'Challa, but he went too far in seeking justice.

Angela

Sleepaway Camp is a cult classic horror movie that arrived in the 1980s as part of the slasher craze of the decade. However, there was a lot more under the hood than just a slasher killer murdering kids at a summer camp. This killer steps beyond the 'killing-for-the-sake-of-it' model and becomes surprisingly sympathetic as a result.

What makes her sympathetic in this movie is that every person Angela kills tried to hurt her. The head cook tried to molest her, many campers bullied her, and her boyfriend at camp cheated on her. It becomes increasingly understandable that Angela felt the need to kill to stop people from hurting her anymore. Unfortunately, the problematic 'twist' at the end has marred this film for many slasher fans, but Angela remains a killer who garners some sympathy from viewers.

Frankenstein’s Monster

One of the earliest examples of a sympathetic movie villain came in the 1931 Universal Horror Movie, Gothic monster in the movie ended up as the tragic figure throughout the story.

Victor created the Monster when he used body parts from different corpses to create life, and by playing God, he doomed the Monster. The Monster was an innocent being who just wanted to learn and to find peace. It constantly tried to connect, first with an older man and then with a little girl, but when it accidentally killed the girl, thinking they were playing, it sealed his fate.

Magneto

Magneto was a very early example of a sympathetic villain, albeit one that took his hatred way too far in the end. In the X-Men trilogy, the first scene showed where Magneto came from and why he turned into the villain he became.

Magneto was a child in a Nazi concentration camp, and when he watched the murders of those he loved, he discovered his mutant powers and lashed out. Professor X wanted peace between mutants and humans, but Magneto saw the evil in most humans' hearts, and he knew his way was best.

General Hummel

In The Rock was not about good vs evil as much as it was about stopping a disaster.

Hummel didn't want anything for himself. He wanted the United States to take responsibility for Recon Marines who died under clandestine missions, but whose families were never compensated. He knew the United States did their soldiers wrong and wanted things made right, knowing he would die in the end, but believing he was helping others.

Pamela Voorhees

One thing that shocked people the first time they saw Friday the 13th was that the mass murderer, killing kids at the campgrounds, was that it was a seemingly kindly woman. However, she went on a rampage of terror, killing countless people before she herself fell.

Pamela was as cold-blooded as they come, but she was also a very tragic and sympathetic villain thanks to her backstory. She was a mother, driven to her rampage thanks to camp counselors who couldn't save her child Jason from drowning and the bullying kids who caused his apparent death to begin with. She was evil, but she had a reason to hate these people.

Next: 10 Scariest Twist Endings In Movies