Top 10 Characters Who Have Defeated Thanos

Even the Mad Titan gets knocked down a peg every once in a while. Welcome to WatchMojo. Today, we’re looking at the "Top 10 Characters Who Have Beaten Thanos."

For this list, we’re looking at characters who have defeated the infamous Marvel Comics super villain, either through combat or trickery.

#10: Lockjaw

The loyal guard dog of the Inhuman Royal Family, this giant bulldog is more than just a friendly pet. With the ability to teleport himself and others across insane distances, he acts as the Inhumans’ primary mode of transportation. He’s often used this ability to defeat enemies, a trick that Thanos experienced first hand. When the colossal canine was leading a group of other animal heroes in search of the Infinity Gems, Thanos arrived and kicked off a massive brawl. After trading some energy beams with the villain, the Inhuman hound teleported his enemy to an alternate dimension, ending the fight and proving himself to be a very good boy.

#9: Squirrel Girl

You might think that a superhero with the proportionate strength and agility of a squirrel, as well as the power to speak to the furry critters, wouldn’t be much of a threat. In this case, you’d be one-hundred percent wrong. This squirrely crimefighter has fought and defeated a number of Marvel villains, including the Mad Titan himself. Unfortunately for us, we never got to see their brawl, as we join the action in the aftermath. Thanos got his purple butt handed to him pretty badly, so badly in fact that The Watcher showed up to see how things played out and assure us that this was, in fact, the real Thanos.

#8: Thane

This relatively new addition to the Marvel pantheon is one of the few beings capable of defeating Thanos, who is, in fact, his dear old dad. The child of Thanos and an Inhuman woman, the young man grew up in a secret Inhuman city in Greenland, only realizing his horrifying lineage when he was exposed to the Terrigen Mists. Despite being relatively young and untrained, he’s got some pretty impressive powers, including the ability to encase his foes in an amber-like substance, which traps them in a state of living death. It was this ability that he used to defeat his father.

This alien hero’s role as one of Earth’s champions brought him up against Thanos on more than a few occasions, and the two quickly became arch-enemies. As is often the case with the whole villain/ hero dynamic, the alien hero usually came out on top when he butted cosmic heads with his arch-foe. On one memorable occasion, he even saved Earth when Thanos used the powerful Cosmic Cube to assume complete control of Earth. Years after his death, an evil alternate version of the deceased hero known as Lord Mar-Vell also gave Thanos a run for his money, as he came from a timeline where life itself had begun to rage out of control.

In the 2015 mega-event “Secret Wars,” the Fantastic Four’s old enemy became the most powerful being in existence when he absorbed the powers of an alien race called The Beyonders. Using this power, he mashed various alternate realities together to form a new world, over which he reigned supreme as a God-King. Thanos, being Thanos, tried to step up and take a piece of this action for himself, but in a dramatic turn, he was reduced to a charred skeleton in seconds. It just goes to show, never punch above your weight class, especially when your opponent’s name includes the term “God-King.” Lesson learned, Thanos?

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Given his status as protector of Asgard and founding member of The Avengers, the Odinson and Thanos have fought a number of times, but few as dramatic as this. After gathering a number of powerful artifacts including Illumination Stone, the Map of All-Ending, and the Chalice of Ruins, Thanos had attained the power of a god for what must have been the third or fourth time. After a pitched battle with the Odinson, it looked as though Thanos might manage to hold on to his newly attained power this time, but a new suit of magical armor provided by Odin turned the tide of battle. Thankfully, Odin had some experience in Thanos-busting himself.

The Merc with a Mouth is one tough cookie, but can he really go up against Thanos himself? The two have long held a rivalry given their relationship to Death. While Thanos has spent decades pursuing the affections of Mistress Death, the grim reaper apparently likes her men a bit less on the magenta side. Naturally, this has resulted in a few tense confrontations between Thanos and Wade. On one memorable occasion, the Regenerating Degenerate even channeled the legendary Uni-Power, a cosmic power that bought him enough time to convince Death to kick Thanos to the curb yet again. All’s fair in love and war, after all.

You’d think that Thanos and the Devourer of Worlds would get along. After all, they both live to cause mass destruction on a cosmic level, and they’re both evidently big fans of purple. But the two cosmic baddies have been aligned against one another for some time, trading world-shattering blows on several occasions. In one conflict, Thanos attempted to stop Galactus from destroying the planet Rigel, as Thanos was trying to walk a more heroic path at the time. Without the powers of the Infinity Gauntlet or some similar cosmic artifact, the then-former-villain was overpowered by the cosmic juggernaut.

The origins of this spacefaring hero are a bit on the complicated side, so let’s save time by cutting to the chase. A longtime force for good in the Marvel Universe, he’s spent years fighting almost every cosmic villain out there, Thanos included. When Thanos finally assembled the powerful Infinity Gauntlet, it was this golden hero who led the charge against his longtime foe. Perhaps it was his memory of an earlier victory against Thanos, one that left the Mad Titan as an immobile statue, that made him confident enough to go up against the big bad again.

If you’re going to create a being solely for the purpose of killing Thanos, you need to make him big, tough and very good with a knife. Thankfully, this destruction-prone anti-hero is all of those things. Whether he’s rocking his classic look of a big purple cape and a wrestling belt or his more modernized appearance, this character has just one goal: to make the Mad Titan all kinds of dead. It may have taken him years, but in the “Annihilation” event, it finally happened in gloriously gory fashion. The only problem with this brutal defeat is that in typical comic book fashion, Thanos eventually returned. Come on, man, you had one job.

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