After 20 movies, scratch that…20 wildly successful movies, Marvel Studios, for all of their crowd-pleasing accomplishments, has managed to deliver us exactly three truly memorable villains (Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, Michael Keaton’s Vulture, and Josh Brolin’s Thanos, in case you had to ask). To use some Marvel-speak, we’re right on the cusp of “Phase Four,” and four is one higher than the number of genuinely worthwhile villains they’ve managed to put on the big screen in the last nine years (they’ve fared better on Netflix with Wilson Fisk, Kilgrave, Mariah Dillard, and Billy Russo, but we’re talking about the movies here).

And while Marvel has struggled to deliver threatening villains since 2008, in that same period of time (and in far fewer movies) Warner Bros. gave us Heath Ledger’s immortal Joker performance in The Dark Knight. Even a secondary baddie like Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow carried more weight than most of the punching bags Marvel has delivered. Tom Hardy’s Bane not only broke Batman but crafted a nightmarish vision for a Gotham City that looked uncomfortably like New York. Hell, for all their struggles, the DCEU managed to give us Michael Shannon’s brilliant General Zod in Man of Steel. So what’s Marvel missing?

The Marvel formula is reasonably simple, and it’s made even the less impressive films at least thoroughly entertaining. You make your hero, flawed though he or she may be, as enjoyable as possible to watch on screen, you keep the stakes big and loud if not demonstrably high, and you break the tension at every opportunity with some wit. It works. But audiences have caught on to this storytelling sleight-of-hand and realize that there has rarely been a moment where we really thought the villain would come out on top in a battle, let alone a war. The closest we’ve come is Thanos, with the godlike, reality-warping powers afforded him by the Infinity Stones, and the bonkers cliffhanger ending of Avengers: Infinity War.

There’s little doubt that Tom Hiddleston’s Loki was the most indispensable bad guy in the MCU. But Loki is very much a god of mischief, not a god of real evil, and with the exception of a few moments in The Avengers, it’s far too easy to root for him while he’s busy charming everyone in sight. On the other hand, no sane person really wanted to see the Joker, Bane, or Ra’s al Ghul succeed in the Dark Knight trilogy.