35 of the greatest movies with Marvel actors that aren't Marvel movies
Dec. 4, 2024Check out off-duty Avengers in movies far outside the MCU
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The Marvel Cinematic Universe boasts some of the greatest actors working in modern Hollywood. For many of them, however, their work outside the confines of the MCU are just as superheroic.
Since 2008, theMarvel Studiosmachine has made careers and revived others while some seem to disappear in the roles entirely. When Robert Downey Jr. was cast to lead Iron Man in 2008, it was deemed by the press a risky decision given RDJ’s very public stints in rehab and one-year prison sentence. But after Iron Man took off as a multi-million dollar blockbuster, gone was RDJ’s radioactive aura. He was a movie star again, and it was only the beginning of Marvel’s reputation to turn Hollywood’s overlooked scraps into genuine heroes.
The vast and expansive Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise has recruited countless actors into its ranks. But the MCU isn’t all-encompassing, and thus many Marvel stars have done impressive work outside the MCU. Here are 35 of the greatest movies with Marvel actors that aren’t Marvel movies.
35. Swingers (1996) with Jon Favreau
Before his work on The Mandalorian, before he was Happy in the MCU, before even Elf, Jon Favreau wrote and starred in Swingers, still one of the greatest and freshest portrayals of modern dating. Favreau stars as Mike, an aspiring comedian in Los Angeles still picking up the pieces of his broken heart after his girlfriend of six years dumped him. After a spontaneous trip to Las Vegas goes south, his best friend (Vince Vaughn) commits to getting Favreau back in the dating pool. Though the movie was directed by Doug Liman, Swingers possesses a lot of Favreau’s unique voice and perspective, which makes it unsurprising he’s found success in the big budget franchise realm.
Before he was Nick Fury, Samuel L. Jackson was Mr. Glass. In M. Night Shyamalan’s acclaimed cerebral thriller Unbreakable, Bruce Willis plays a family man who discovers he might have incredible superpowers. Jackson co-stars in the movie as Elijah Price, aka “Mr. Glass,” an enigmatic art collector and comic book fanatic who is obsessed with Willis' latent gifts. Released the same year X-Men blew up at the box office, Shyamalan’s movie feels like it foresaw the next few decades of mainstream cinema and came early to offer something totally different.
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In the MCU, Zendaya is Spider-Man’s girlfriend. But in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, she’s the villain. Centered around a steamy love triangle of highly competitive tennis pros, Challengers chronicles the broken friendship of Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist). Starting from their tight-knit bond in college to their estrangement in adulthood, the men compete in a low-stakes regional tennis match. Victory on the court isn’t what’s on the line, however, but their own worth in front of the calculating and ambitious Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya), herself a once-promising tennis star until a bad injury stalled her career.
Avengers co-stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen team up in Wind River, a striking neo-noir Western from Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan. Prompted by Sheridan’s outrage at widespread violence against American Indigenous women, the movie follows a wildlife officer (Renner) and an FBI agent (Olsen) who track down the culprit behind the rape and murder of an 18-year-old American Indian woman on a Wyoming reservation. Amid their investigation, they find their own lives are in jeopardy. A snow-covered thriller, Wind River is not one to be missed.
Widows, Steve McQueen’s muscular remake of a classic British TV show, sports an array of different Marvel actors, but the movie is good enough to warrant its own attention. The movie centers around a group of Chicago women who work to steal millions from a local politician in order to pay their late husbands' debt to a crime boss. Elizabeth Debicki, who stars in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, leads the movie with Brian Tyree Henry (Eternals), Daniel Kaluuya (Black Panther), and Carrie Coon (the voice of Thanos minion Proxima Midnight).
Room turned Brie Larson from an up-and-coming actress to legit Oscar winner. In Room, Larson stars as a young woman with a son who finally breaks free after eight years of forced captivity. (Jacob Tremblay co-stars as her son.) Most of the movie deals with the fallout of their new freedom, including the struggle to acclimate to a much bigger world and to reconcile with old wounds. Larson shows why she deserved her Oscar through her immense range as a woman haunted by her traumas but resolute to start a new life; all the while, her surrounding family learns to love her innocent son who carries the DNA of the man who ruined all their lives.
The cult romantic fantasy Stardust, based on the Neil Gaiman novel, happens to feature quite a few Marvel actors before they were ever in the MCU. Set in 19th century England, the movie follows young Tristan (Daredevil’s Charlie Cox) as he seeks a fallen star to impress his crush only to find that the star in question is herself a beautiful young woman, Yvaine (Claire Danes). Recurring Ant-Man star Michelle Pfeiffer plays the lead villain Lamia, part of a trio of witch sisters, while The Punisher’s Ben Barnes has a minor role as the younger version of Tristan’s father. A cool bonus: From the DCEU, Man of Steel’s Henry Cavill also appears as Tristan’s romantic rival, the studly Humphrey.
In the immediate aftermath of The Avengers, the impact of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was hard to ignore. Feeling that fatigue quite early, Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu teamed up with Michael Keaton – still remembered for his Batman movies – to deliver Birdman, an experimental dark comedy that follows the emotional breakdown of a has-been star of a fictional superhero film series as he attempts a career comeback on Broadway. While the movie is remembered for its novel form as one long continuous take, Birdman muses over the might of commercial intellectual property over art with perspective. The movie also stars Edward Norton, who played the Hulk (in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk) before being recast, while Keaton himself later starred in Spider-Man: Homecoming as another winged character, Vulture.
David Fincher’s unforgettable dark psychological thriller Seven, about a serial killer whose murders are modeled after the Biblical Seven Deadly Sins, is mostly shouldered by its stars Morgan Freeman (as a weary, seasoned police detective), Brad Pitt (as his rookie partner), and Kevin Spacey (as the elusive serial killer who outwits them both). But along for the ill-fated journey is Gwyneth Paltrow as Tracy, the wife of Pitt’s character who represents innocence that is later ravaged. Without giving too much away, the movie’s iconic ending is not for the faint of heart. Try not to lose your head over it.
While Oliver Stone’s media satire/crime movie Natural Born Killers drew polarizing reviews in 1994, it has enjoyed reappraisal as a movie so prescient in the media’s inordinate power to turn dangerous figures into public personas. The movie stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as a sort of 1990s Bonnie and Clyde – runaway outlaws and killers who roam America while becoming celebrities thanks to media sensationalism. Iron Man’s Robert Downey Jr. plays a major role in the movie as Wayne Gale, a tabloid TV host whose coverage of Harrelson and Lewis' criminal anti-heroes ruin the American psyche. RDJ has done countless great movies in his career, from Chaplin to Zodiac to Tropic Thunder to Oppenheimer, but his performance as a slimy media personality makes Natural Born Killers deserving of outstanding mention.
In Avengers: Infinity War, Josh Brolin held the power of the Infinity Stones. In the Coen Brothers' new millennium classic No Country for Old Men, he’s just a guy with a briefcase full of money. In this celebrated adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, Brolin plays a pronghorn hunter who stumbles upon the site of a drug deal gone wrong and $2 million in cash. While stashing the money, he attracts the attention of a ruthless killer (Javier Bardem). No Country for Old Men is one of the most acclaimed movies of all time, a Best Picture recipient whose stature is still understood today.
Nearly a decade after Sylvester Stallone officially hung up his gloves as Rocky, Michael B. Jordan stepped into the ring for the sequel franchise Creed. Jordan stars as the forgotten son of famed boxer Apollo Creed (played by Carl Weathers in the Rocky series) who bursts onto the scene under the tutelage of Rocky Balboa (Stallone). Helmed by Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, Creed was no featherweight sequel, but bonafide championship material thanks to both Jordan’s handsome charisma and Coogler’s exceptional direction. Tessa Thompson, from the Thor movies, co-stars as Creed’s neighbor and love interest.
Todd Haynes' troubling and harrowing drama May December stars Natalie Portman as a movie actress who meets the real-life figure she’s set to portray: Gracie (Julianne Moore), who gained notoriety in the 1990s for being a 36-year-old grooming a 13-year-old boy. With Gracie’s story set to become a movie, Portman’s character visits Gracie’s family, including her younger husband – the former 13-year-old (played by Charles Melton) – and their two high school-aged children. May December has an utterly fantastic Portman, who shows more raw power than her Thor-ified Jane Foster from Thor: Love and Thunder.
The last movie starring Chadwick Boseman to be released during his painfully short life and career is Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. A stunning war drama about legacy, capital, and reparations, the movie follows a group of Black Vietnam War veterans who return to Saigon in search of buried gold they left behind. Boseman plays a pivotal role in the movie as Norman, their deceased squad leader who appears in their collective memories. Boseman is thunderous in Lee’s film, being an alluring figure of masculine energy. Jonathan Majors, who was briefly the Marvel villain Kang the Conqueror, also has a major role as David, the son of one of the veterans.
Tony Leung was an established movie star in Hong Kong when he made his Hollywood debut in Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (as the villainous but handsome father of Shang-Chi, Wenwu). One of his biggest movies of world renown is Wong Kar-wai’s deeply romantic drama In the Mood for Love, where Leung plays a married salaryman who learns that his wife is engaged in an affair with his boss. Maggie Cheung co-stars as said boss' own spouse, and together, Leung and Cheung work to keep their romantic feelings for each other at bay. While many of Wong Kar-wai’s movies drip with sweeping emotions lit under neon street lights, In the Mood for Love deserves special recognition. Its sense of yearning and passion is almost too much to bear.
A movie that needs no introduction, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction transformed Samuel L. Jackson from working actor to bonafide movie star, in his role as Bible-quoting hitman Jules. Jackson is just one piece of the quilt that Tarantino weaves in his landmark sophomore movie, an interconnected narrative of different characters and fates who dwell in the underbelly of Los Angeles crime. Jackson’s machine gun dialogue would be the most quotable ever in movie history, if actually saying them out loud didn’t draw nasty looks from everyone at the diner. Also in the movie: Tim Roth, as the diner robber before his Marvel role as the Abomination.
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Chris Evans is the ultimate hero and role model as Captain America. But in Bong Joon-ho’s awe-inspiring multilingual movie, Snowpiercer (based on Jacques Lob’s graphic novel series), he is a revolutionary haunted by his own inhumanity. In the grim, frosty dystopia of Snowpiercer, a massive train roams Earth containing the remnants of humanity. The poor are relegated to the back while the rich enjoy the clean luxuries of the front. Evans takes charge in Snowpiercer as Curtis, who has quietly planted the seeds for a proletariat uprising to make it to the front of the train. You can poke all the holes in its logic and worldbuilding all you want, it doesn’t stop Bong Joon-ho’s movie from hitting harder than a front charge of Cap’s shield.
Eric Francisco is a freelance entertainment journalist and graduate of Rutgers University. If a movie or TV show has superheroes, spaceships, kung fu, or John Cena, he’s your guy to make sense of it. A former senior writer at Inverse, his byline has also appeared at Vulture, The Daily Beast, Observer, and The Mary Sue. You can find him screaming at Devils hockey games or dodging enemy fire in Call of Duty: Warzone.
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