Ranking the 20 Most Nefarious Live-Action Disney Villains

With the arrival of 'Maleficent,' Disney is bringing one of its most iconic animated villains to the live action realm. We've compiled a list of the best, strangest and  most noteworthy live-action Disney villains and have ranked them to see who is truly the evilest of them all.

There's an enjoyable mania to Helena Bonham Carter's card-themed evil queen, and in a world full of talking animals, dragons and magic potions, she adds a welcome dash of live-action color.

You've got to have some level of appreciation for a bad guy who declares war on Santa Claus. That's just cold. Pun intended.

Before he battled the Starks on 'Game of Thrones,' Peter Dinklage took on a super-powered talking dog! Being upstaged by a dog isn’t all that bad, especially when he wears a cape.

There's no way we could ignore the hyper-intelligent secret agent turncoat mole voiced by the one and only Nicolas Cage. With his ridiculous voice and the fact that he's a mole who turns out to be a mole, Speckles really is one of a kind.

Few actors can exude casual evil quite like Sean Bean, and he gives this particular villain—a fellow treasure hunter alongside the film’s Indiana Jones-like hero, played by Nicolas Cage--the proper note of menace.

'The Country Bears' may be one of the more under-the-radar Disney films, but Christopher Walken's Reed Thimple is unforgettable. Acting almost entirely opposite talking bears, Walken offers no restraint and creates a colorful, madcap baddie that feels like he escaped from a Saturday morning cartoon.

Susan Sarandon's Queen Narissa delivers a fantastic tribute to animated Disney villains of old, and one of the biggest highlights in a film with many highlights. After Malificent, she’s the next Disney villain who deserves her own movie.

They may have not made a huge impact at first, but the Sanderson sisters have lingered on in the consciousness of a generation. If you were a kid in the '90s, this trio of witches was forever burned into your impressionable young brain.

She's immortal, a little bit strange, and you never know what she's going to do next. We cannot imagine anyone other than the utterly unique Tilda Swinton playing the Narnia series' main villain. She looks like she literally walked onto the set from a fantasy world.

Disney has a long history of great evil pirates, but that legacy begins with Long John Silver. Robert Newton's take on the iconic one-legged pirate wrote the template for how to play pirates on screen and everyone else has run to this performance like students run to Wikipedia.

Al Pacino spent a large portion of his career playing mobsters, but this parody may have been one of his most memorable. With his absurd make-up and penchant for screaming, he's the kid-friendly, Sunday newspaper comic-strip version of Michael Corleone.

You may remember him as the father in 'Mary Poppins,' but David Tomlinson also played the nemesis to the iconic VW Beetle Herbie. It takes a special kind of actor to play a character that gets humiliated by a car every five minutes (and still feel classy), but he somehow manages to pull it off!

Glenn Close’s live-action take on the unforgettable Cruella DeVille is devious, terrifying and uncomfortably sexy in all the right ways. Wait, did we just say sexy?

With his grotesque tentacle face, there has never been a villain who looks quite like Davy Jones. He's the kind of murderous, tortured, supernatural pirate that you want to get to know in the corner booth of a darkened bar. After a few rums, he'll have some stories to tell!

What happens when you cast a former James Bond as and Errol Flynn-esque Hollywood actor in league with the Nazis? You get a bad guy who truly deserves to get punched in the face by a square-jawed, jetpack-wearing superhero. Neville Sinclair may be the most despicable live-action Disney villain ever.

One part Wizard of Oz and one part HAL 9000, the Master Control Program is one of the most memorable evil computers in movie history. The next time you lose a video game, just remember there's an evil floating head inside it, personally sabotaging everything you do.

It takes a tremendous actor to go toe-to-toe with Captain Jack Sparrow and Geoffrey Rush responds by going even bigger, taking every pirate cliche and owning it like a boss…uh, or a pirate captain.
 

How evil are Dr. Hans and his killer robot, Maximilian? So evil that the movie ends with them going to Space Hell. Seriously. Most Disney villains go to jail or fall off a cliff, but 'The Black Hole' tosses its baddies through a portal and into an alternate dimension of pain and brimstone. That's pretty harsh and pretty awesome at the same time.

This one is just unfair. On the page, Captain Nemo is already one of the great villains in all of fiction. Put James Mason in the role and you have a bad guy who's as terrifying as he is sympathetic.

The funny thing about Judge Doom is that he's a live action Disney villain who's actually an animated villain in disguise. In other words, he's a villain in the film and in the real world, and no one can top that. Congrats, Judge Doom. You've won this round.