Marvel Studios added a brand-new original villain to its ranks with Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The Marvel Cinematic Universe picks most of its heroes and antagonists straight from decades of comic book source material, but the studio also invents new characters whenever a story calls for one. Several of those inventions grew into memorable threats in their own right, and the newest one just arrived in theaters alongside a familiar web-slinger.
Snow, the masked leader of the Hand played by Fan Xiaoshuang, is an original character created for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, making her the 11th major villain that Marvel Studios invented specifically for the MCU. The lineage of these creations dates all the way back to the franchise’s first film in 2008. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, Brand New Day stars Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, and Jon Bernthal, and it arrived on Friday, July 31, to $360 million domestically, the biggest opening weekend in box office history.
The film reintroduces the Hand, the ninja organization that fans first encountered in Netflix’s Daredevil before its larger role in Iron Fist and The Defenders. Set in 2028, the story reveals that Peter Parker already fought the group offscreen and dismantled its operations.
William Metzger, the Department of Damage Control official played by Severance star Tramell Tillman, then recruited the leaderless ninjas and turned them into his agency’s private security force. Metzger tells Spider-Man in the film that the ninjas were "a group of kids without a leader" before he stepped in.
Snow commands those ninjas throughout the film, inheriting a position once held by Elodie Yung’s Elektra, who seemingly perished at the end of The Defenders, but is now back for Daredevil: Born Again. Her identity stayed hidden for months, and set photos of the masked figure fueled guesses ranging from Mariko Yashida to the Spider-Queen. The answer turned out to be a wholly new creation. This new creation now joins an illustrious group of original Marvel villains in the MCU.
Major Original Marvel Villains Created for the MCU
Raza
Faran Tahir played Raza in Iron Man, the 2008 film that launched the entire franchise. Raza commanded the militant cell that ambushed Tony Stark’s convoy in Afghanistan and held the weapons designer captive in a cave. His price for Tony’s freedom was a Jericho missile. Tony secretly assembled the first Iron Man armor instead and burned the camp down on his way out.
As interesting as Raza was in that movie, the character is not from the comics. Marvel created him for the film as the on-the-ground face of the Ten Rings, the shadowy organization whose true leader stayed hidden for over a decade. Obadiah Stane, who paid for the hit on Tony, betrayed and paralyzed Raza once the deal collapsed, and the character never appeared again. However, that will change when Tahir reprises the role in VisionQuest this October.
Trevor Slattery
Ben Kingsley joined the MCU in Iron Man 3 as Trevor Slattery, a washed-up actor hired by Aldrich Killian to pose as a fearsome terrorist called the Mandarin. Marvel invented the failed thespian to pull off the film’s biggest twist. Trevor was never the true mastermind, but his televised threats gave Killian cover while Extremis soldiers exploded across the country, and Tony Stark eventually found the drunken performer lounging in a Miami mansion.
The character resurfaced in the short film All Hail the King and again in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, where the real Ten Rings kept him around as a court jester. This year’s Wonder Man dropped Trevor back into shady territory. Under threat of prison from Damage Control agent Cleary, played by Arian Moayed, he worms his way into the life of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Simon Williams and secretly informs on the young actor.
Trevor redeems himself by the finale, wearing the Mandarin costume one final time and taking the blame for an explosion so that Simon stays free.
Tyler Hayward
Josh Stamberg’s Tyler Hayward served as the acting director of SWORD in WandaVision, the series that began Marvel Studios’ Disney+ era in January 2021. Hayward presented himself as a level-headed official managing the Westview crisis, then revealed a personal agenda as the episodes rolled on. He remains one of the few television villains with no comic book counterpart at all.
The director secretly used Vision’s corpse to assemble a weaponized synthezoid known as White Vision, then sent his creation into Westview with orders to kill Wanda Maximoff and destroy the Vision she made.
He even fired on Wanda’s children during the finale before ending the series in handcuffs. The consequences of his pet project will play out in VisionQuest, the upcoming Disney+ series centered on the surviving synthezoid.
Miss Minutes
Tara Strong voiced Miss Minutes, the TVA’s cheerful animated clock, across both seasons of Loki. He Who Remains designed the AI as the friendly face of his organization, and her folksy Southern charm sold countless lies about the TVA’s origins to the workers inside it. She always knew the truth about the man behind the curtain.
Season 2 made her even more villainous. Miss Minutes conspired with Ravonna Renslayer to replace He Who Remains in a bid to get a real body. Her devotion to the man who made her grew more unhinged with every episode. The cartoon mascot who initially came across as cute and friendly turned out to be one of the strangest original threats Marvel put on screen.
Sylvie
Sophia Di Martino debuted as Sylvie in Loki Season 1, playing a Variant of the God of Mischief. The TVA ripped Sylvie away from her timeline as a child, and after escaping, she grew up hiding inside apocalypses while plotting the organization’s destruction. Her opening act in the series was a string of deadly ambushes on TVA Minutemen, followed by a bombing of the Sacred Timeline itself.
Sylvie earns her villain status through her Season 1 choices, where she opposed Loki and the TVA throughout the season and brushed aside every warning at the Citadel at the End of Time.
Her stabbing of He Who Remains cracked the Multiverse wide open and triggered the central conflict of the Multiverse Saga. She shares a name with the comics' Sylvie Lushton, but the show’s version is an original creation with an entirely different history.
General Dreykov
Ray Winstone played General Dreykov in Black Widow, the hidden mastermind of the Red Room and the man who turned kidnapped girls into brainwashed assassins. Natasha Romanoff defected to SHIELD after bombing his office in Budapest, an attack she believed killed both Dreykov and his young daughter, Antonia.
However, both survived. Dreykov transformed Antonia into the masked killer Taskmaster and kept controlling Widows across the globe through chemical subjugation, all from a Red Room facility floating above the clouds.
His name actually predates his movie by nearly a decade, since Loki taunted Natasha about "Dreykov’s daughter" in The Avengers, but the character himself was created for the 2021 film. He met his end when Natasha and Yelena Belova sent the entire facility crashing out of the sky.
Xu Wenwu
Tony Leung’s Xu Wenwu appears in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings as the immortal warlord who conquered kingdoms for a thousand years with the ten rings on his arms. He founded the Ten Rings organization, the same group whose foot soldiers took Tony Stark hostage in Iron Man, and he fathered the film’s hero before grief over his wife’s death consumed him.
Although Wenwu is an original character, The Mandarin exists in Marvel Comics as Iron Man’s archenemy, but Marvel Studios refused to adapt that character directly because of his stereotypical roots.
The studio created Wenwu as an entirely original figure instead, and the warlord openly mocks the Mandarin name that Killian’s people invented for their fake terrorist. A false promise of his dead wife’s return led Wenwu to free the soul-eating Dweller-in-Darkness, and he passed the rings to his son with his dying breath.
Najma
Nimra Bucha’s Najma led the Clandestines in Ms. Marvel, a band of exiles from the Noor Dimension who first approached Kamala Khan as friendly faces from her great-grandmother’s past. The warmth evaporated the moment Kamala refused to help them. Najma wanted the young hero’s bangle to tear open the Veil between dimensions, regardless of the destruction the crossing would unleash on Earth.
The Clandestines loosely trace back to a '90s Marvel Comics series about a family of superpowered immortals, but Najma herself never existed on the page. The show created her outright. Her pursuit ended in tragedy, as the Veil began devouring everything around it and Najma sacrificed herself to seal it, passing her powers to her son Kamran in the process.
Todd Phelps
Jon Bass played Todd Phelps in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, introducing himself as an obnoxious wealthy client at Jennifer Walters’ law firm. The comedy kept the season’s real antagonist hidden in plain sight. Todd secretly ran the misogynistic troll site Intelligencia under the username HulkKing, rallying an online mob against Jen from behind his keyboard.
His campaign escalated from coordinated harassment to outright theft, as his operatives stole a sample of Jen’s blood and leaked private footage of her at an awards gala to destroy her reputation. The stunt provoked her into a public rampage that briefly put her behind bars.
The Intelligencia name belongs to a group of villainous geniuses in the comics, but Todd was written for the show. He injected himself with synthesized Hulk blood in the finale, right before Jen smashed the fourth wall and demanded a rewritten ending from K.E.V.I.N., Marvel’s fictional story-generating AI.
Gravik
Kingsley Ben-Adir portrayed Gravik in Secret Invasion, a radicalized Skrull commander who decided humanity’s broken promises justified taking Earth by force. Operating out of a Russian compound called New Skrullos, he slipped shape-shifting agents into governments around the world and engineered a bombing in Moscow designed to spark a war between the United States and Russia.
Gravik also oversaw the Super-Skrull program, splicing DNA harvested from old Avengers battlefields into his rebels to give them superpowers. No version of Gravik exists in the comics, as the character originated entirely with the series. Emilia Clarke’s G'iah killed him in their climactic showdown.
Geraldo Amartey is a writer at The Direct. He joined the team in 2025, bringing with him four years of experience covering entertainment news, pop culture, and fan-favorite franchises for sites like YEN, Briefly and Tuko.
