Robert Downey Jr.'s Creepy '90s Horror Movie Will Change How You Look At The Marvel Actor

These days, Robert Downey Jr. is best known for playing the de facto leader of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe across its first three phases. Iron Man was the perfect superhero to lay the foundation of the MCU, thanks in no small part to Downey Jr.'s iconic portrayal of Tony Stark. Following Downey Jr.'s historic run playing the character, it is extremely difficult to see the actor play not only a villain, but a deeply disturbed and terrifying one — and we're not talking about Doctor Doom.

Downey Jr. played main antagonist Vivian Thompson in the psychological horror film "In Dreams." One of Downey Jr.'s forgotten failures, "In Dreams" was panned by critics and bombed hard at the box office when it was released in 1999. And it certainly hasn't seen much in the way of positive reappraisal in the years since, with nobody racing to declare it a cult classic. But it's still a fascinating footnote in Downey Jr.'s filmography due to the type of movie it is and the character that the actor portrays.

"In Dreams" follows a woman named Claire Cooper (Annette Bening) who has clairvoyant dreams, including ones that end up predicting the murder of her daughter. As Claire's dreams become not only more vivid but much darker in nature, she finds that she has seemingly developed a sort of telepathic connection with disturbed serial killer Vivian Thompson (Downey Jr.). When the police doubt Claire's abilities and rebuff her offers to help them catch Vivian, she decides to take matters into her own hands — and thus, a twisted game of cat and mouse between the two gets underway. 

It's not entirely accurate to say Downey Jr. has never played any other villains besides Vivian. He was the bad guy in the 2006 remake of "The Shaggy Dog," but obviously that was a pretty low stakes affair. He's portrayed people of questionable morality in a number of other films, though they didn't typically cross over into outright villainy in the traditional sense. Interestingly, he nearly made his superhero movie debut as a bad guy. Downey Jr. lost out on a huge Batman villain role: He was in the running to play Scarecrow in "Batman Begins" before the part ultimately went to Cillian Murphy.

Of course, as everyone with even a passing interest in Marvel movies knows, Downey Jr. is set to play the upcoming MCU version of Doctor Doom, but we don't yet know exactly how that's going to pan out. Doctor Doom sometimes veers into anti-hero territory in the comics, so it's entirely possible that Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom could follow suit. As it stands, Vivian in "In Dreams" is Downey Jr.'s only villain role of any real substance — even if it's wasted on a completely forgettable film.