Certainly movies in general are more popular than comic strips in general. But my thinking is that the movie market is more fragmented than the newspaper comics market, and most people don’t have any particular interest in superheroes. Someone who’s not into superheroes won’t see the latest Spider-Man movie at all, and probably won’t be watching the right sort of movies to see trailers for it, and might not even see very many TV ads for it. They might hear that there’s a Spider-Man movie coming out, but that’s about all they’ll know, and that won’t tell them who the villain is.
But if your paper carries the comic strip, and you read the comics, you’re going to at least glance over all of the comics. Even if you’re not a superhero fan, you might have noticed someone in the Spider-Man strip saying “You won’t get away with this, Egghead!”, just because the page was right there in front of you.
Though I will grant that Egghead isn’t the most distinguished of villains, so it might not hold true right this moment.
I think we’re looking at a pretty narrow set of people here: folks who still get a newspaper regularly, whose newspaper carries the Spider-Man comic, who actually read the Spider-Man comic, and for whom that comic is their primary impression of Spider-Man. I suspect the number of people who read the daily comic mostly because, “I remember reading about Spider-Man fighting Doc Ock when I was eight!” is substantial, in which case, the identity of the current villain in the comics is irrelevant.
And, of course, comics and movies aren’t the only two vectors people are going to encounter these characters in. There’s the actual comics, of course, and the TV shows, and the toys, and the licensed bed sheets. And then there’s the comercials for aaaaalllll of that, in every conceivable medium. How many people are going to know who Spider-Man’s arch enemy is from the comics, versus from Christmas shopping for their kids? And then, lastly, there’s the degree to which a character has penetrated other works. How many people are familiar with the Hulk from the '70s TV show? And how many more are familiar with the Hulk from the parodies of the '70s show they’ve seen on Family Guy?
There’s another variable, here. Interest in superheroes is not evenly distributed by age. We may assume, for the sake of argument, that the age cohort with the highest interest in superheroes is eight. Well, we were all eight at some point, and the superheroes we were most likely to be exposed to is going to depend on when we were eight. Assuming you give up superheroes when you discover sex, like a normal person, your next major exposure to superheroes is going to be when you have kids, and then again when you have grandkids. Your impression of superheroes is going to be dependent on what was going on at each of those stages.
Which is where Superman and Batman come in with the biggest edge, because unless you’re in your 90s, they weren’t just prominent in the culture at each of those exposure points, they were fully saturated into other media. Even if you never got an actual Superman comic, you almost certainly saw Superman in something - and even if you never gave your kid a Superman comic, you gave him something that had Superman in it. And again when you’re a grandparent.
Some other heroes have hit that saturation point - Spider-Man, maybe the Hulk, maybe Captain America - but they’ve either hit it much later, or weren’t able to consistently maintain that level of exposure. If you were a kid in the '40s, you had a much higher chance to know Captain America than if you were a kid in the '50s, and maybe about the same if you’re a kid right now.
Egghead! Right! How can you not forget a villain like that?
I’ve never read comic books, but I love superhero movies and watched all the usual shows as a kid, so my most memorable “main villains” come from those sources, and are tied to particular performances.
Batman: The Joker. I could name several others (Riddler, Penguin) from the days of the Adam West series, but the Joker is the biggie. The 1989 Batman movie with Jack Nicholson as the Joker overshadowed everything that came before, and then the Christopher Nolan trilogy with Heath Ledger as the Joker in 2008 did the same thing again.
Superman: Lex Luthor, as in Gene Hackman from Superman (1978).
Spiderman: The Green Goblin, as ultra-creepily portrayed by Willem Dafoe in the 2002 movie. Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock in Spiderman 2 was also memorable, but not as much. The 2012 Spiderman was quite good, but I can’t remember who the villain even was.
Hulk: “Mr. McGee, don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” Not sure if McGee counts as a villain exactly, but he’s the first antagonist I think of.
Marvel Cinematic Universe superheroes: Unless listed above, whoever they were fighting in those movies.
To be fair, I don’t know what proportion of papers still run the Spider-Man strip (or, more to the point, what proportion of the population said newspapers serve). I just know that Cleveland’s does, and I might be incorrectly extrapolating from that.
