Hollywood sucks at Opponent Balance.
Not familiar with the term? Not surprising, I made it up about 20 minutes before writing this. In essence, it's how you balance the power of two opponents in a story to make it interesting. A lot of movies, comics, and games are really terrible at this, but I'm going to focus on the movie industry for the moment. I might sprinkle some smaller examples of the others in for flavour, though.
One thing I must bring up right at the start is american wrestling. They constantly have to deal with these issues, and have to find ways of making them work in a setting that tolerates a whole lot less bullshit than comics or movies. So I will be using them as sort of a measuring stick. Wrestling also has a term called "getting your heat back", which basically is a combination of getting revenge and regaining what your character has lost by losing.
I think I'll have to simply start listing illustrative examples for this to work, so let's get this thing started:
Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
He's a good example. He is incredibly strong. Stronger, in fact, than even the Hulk. In fact, he is stronger than any one member of the Avengers. No single one of them has any hope of even hurting him alone.
What he represents is an opponent that is on a level entirely above that of the heroes. We don't expect any hero to beat him by themselves. He is the kind of villain who is used to galvanize the heroes into one group working together to beat him.
Ronan the Accuser doesn't get his own headline, because he's pretty much identical in this regard. Both are defeated when the heroes work together, the one thing we are rooting for them to do.
It's a simple archetype, and usually it is not fucked up.
That lizard bloke from Amazing Spider Man
He is a fairly good example. He is created in the same kind of way that Spidey was; a normal human altered by SCIENCE! to become something else.
So how well is he balanced against Spider Man? Fairly well through most of the movie; he can lay a beating on Spider Man, but Spider Man can counter very well when he's actually using all his abilities.
I'll lump him in with Dr. Ozzy Osbourne, or whatever his name is, where Spider Man has to fight much harder than the villain in order to stop the villain from killing innocent people as well as Spidey himself. I think that's a good way of maintaining a balance; you don't have to have the characters measure strength against strength, you can add other elements that cannot easily be quantifiable, sort of leaving the issue of Opponent Balance in the air.
Dave Bautista from Guardians of the Galaxy
He is a fantastic example of what not to do. Make no mistake, I love his character. I think Bautista just owns every single scene he is in, and the movies would be greatly diminished without him.
But in terms of Opponent Balance, he is literally useless. His great vendetta is against Ronan the Accuser, the aforementioned good example of a villain that is on a level above the heroes; one that no single hero can hope to defeat. And yet that's Drax's feud; against an enemy he can't even scratch. Heck, the worm they fight at the start of the second movie he doesn't even manage to injure at all.
In wrestling terms, imagine if a tiny little featherweight would try to fight, well...Batista with brute strength. It would be laughable. So how do you work with that? Will you have that character change strategy and use other methods against the villain? Or will they simply keep going and become pure comical relief?
Because, remember; we're not actually shown how powerful a fighter Drax the Destroyer is. We're told it. We don't really get any point of reference for how powerful he is, other than that he is less powerful than Ronan the Accuser.
In fact, he has a fight with Ronan, and loses completely. And what do the screenwriters have him do? Change nothing. Keep going the way he always did.
Drax did, however, get his heat back; in the end, he had an equal part in killing Ronan with the other guardians. He lost his first fight clean, he didn't evolve in strength, but got his heat back anyway.
Speaking generally for a moment, you always have to have in mind what the implications of losing a fight are, and what it says about your character. Let's say you have decided to book a match where your top face(good guy) goes up against your top heel(bad guy), and you want your face to lose. How will he lose? That will impact the face's character, and will be a deciding factor in how you'll have to move forward.
Let's say you book it so that the heel simply wrestles better, wins clean because he hits harder, moves faster, and has more heart. Then what? How will your face move on from that? Is he even in the championship picture anymore? You might want to simply book another match where the face wins clean instead. But then what? Why did he lose so decisively in the first match?
In Rocky III, Rocky loses like hell against Mr. T. It shows that he's lost the Eye of the Tiger, that intangible factor. He's no longer hungry for it. Then the point where he's finally ready to make his return to the ring is when it's clear that he's regained the Eye of the Tiger. That's a proper journey of a hero.
These are questions some screenwriters tend to ignore. And for some reason it's usually involving superheroes. That's why it upsets me when heroes are defeated clean by enemies on roughly the same level of strength.
Okay, I'll cut to the chase: I hate the dynamic between Venom and Spider Man in Spider Man 3. Venom is simply better; he's faster, stronger, has better webbing, he is simply superior. But he's not a character on an entirely different level. He's a dude, sized like a dude, who can be injured like a dude. When Spidey loses to him, that makes Spidey worse.
And Venom has him at his mercy not one, but two times, refraining from killing him in favour of just doing fuck all for a little while, waiting for him to get a cinderblock to the head and the arrival of Harry Osborne respectively. This is actually something that happens in wrestling as well, and usually it's the result of someone missing their cue to run in. All of a sudden the action in the ring can stop, and someone is supposed to run in and interfere, but doesn't show up on time, so they have to fill that time with something.
Anyway, Peter never gets his heat back on Venom. He's saved by Harry, which does nothing to make him look any stronger, and after that he uses some trickery to defeat Venom. He ends the movie with the fact established that he simply isn't good enough to beat Venom.
Dammit, here's the last example:
Wolverine from X-tremely fantastically shit movie
He's a terrible example.
He fights with Sabretooth, and gets his arse handed to him on a pewter platter.
Then he gets magical metal skeleton.
Then he beats Sabretooth.
Sabretooth is clearly fucking better to begin with at fighting! Wolvie gets an upgrade that he has done nothing to deserve and that he hasn't worked for at all. It's like if Apollo Creed walked up to Rocky, gave him a magic ring, and then Rocky could go an beat the living daylights out of Mr. T.
And Logan at no point gets his heat back, because you can't show you're better than someone if you're given a free fucking upgrade after losing the first fight!
Ian McCollum!
