7 characters who were so massive they got their own story

There is a moment, in every reasonably well-made movie or series, when the supporting character steps onto the scene and the protagonist loses. It is not the fault of the script or the director. It is practically a law of audiovisual media: when a secondary character has more charisma than the space they occupy, they tear a hole in the narrative. The protagonist keeps delivering their lines, going on their journey, winning or losing exactly as planned, but the audience has already left the room remembering the other person.

The industry watched this phenomenon for decades with some discomfort, like someone seeing an employee who is too talented for their position. Until, at some point, someone realized the obvious: if the supporting character steals the scene, let's sell the stolen scene as a new product. Charge fans of the original movie for a ticket to a second movie about the character they actually wanted to see.

The result is an entire genre: the character spin-off. Some are embarrassing (I won't name names, but everyone thought of the same one). Others, against all odds, are better than the work that spawned them. This list is about the latter.

Cassian Andor, the rebel nobody asked for and everyone needed

Cassian Andor entered Rogue One (2016) as just another name on the list of soldiers doomed to die before the credits. He followed the schedule perfectly. Diego Luna did the job with quiet competence, the kind where nobody leaves the theater crying, but everyone remembers the face. By Lucasfilm's calculations, that was supposed to be the end of the story.

And then, six years later, Disney+ decided to make a series about his past. They announced it, and nobody expected much. Star Wars had already been turned, at the time, into a theme park that repeated itself to exhaustion, with tearful cameos, fan service, and a general feeling that the galaxy far, far away had shrunk to the size of a shopping mall. Andor (2022 to 2025) arrived and did the unthinkable: it told an adult espionage story about political radicalization, about how empires sustain themselves from within through bureaucratic boredom and routine violence.

The second season finished with a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest score of any live-action Star Wars, surpassing even The Empire Strikes Back. It won a Peabody Award, five Emmys, and achieved the bizarre critical consensus that the best thing made in the Star Wars universe in forty years is about a supporting character from a movie that was already considered a supporting piece in the saga. Tony Gilroy, the showrunner, treated Cassian as if he deserved the depth of a John le Carré character. And he did.

Xena, the villain who was supposed to die in three episodes

Xena's story begins with an administrative detail: she was supposed to die. She appeared in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995) as a three-episode antagonist with a closed arc, a planned death, and everything. Lucy Lawless, the second choice after the first candidate had to drop out, put on the armor, gave two weeks of production, and things spiraled out of control.

The audience wrote letters. In droves. Before the internet was what it is today, which means they actually had to grab a pen, paper, a stamp, and mail them. Rob Tapert, the producer, convinced the studio not to kill the character and instead give her an entire series. Xena: Warrior Princess premiered in 1995, lasted six seasons, 134 episodes, and by the second season, it was already drawing a larger audience than its parent show.

It was distributed in 108 countries. It became a feminist icon, a lesbian icon (the relationship with Gabrielle was never confirmed on screen, but everyone knew), and a 1990s cultural phenomenon of the kind that defines an entire decade. There are women who grew up with Xena as a reference for strength that never apologized for existing, which in 1995 was an almost revolutionary concept for American prime-time television. Hercules kept existing. But it is Xena who appears in memes. And it is Xena who returned in revivals later on. Hercules became a footnote to the very series he starred in.

Puss in Boots, the cat who won two Oscar-nominated movies

When Shrek 2 (2004) came out, Puss in Boots was a supporting assassin-for-hire. Two minutes was all it took for him to steal Shrek's scene inside Shrek's own movie. It worked so well that DreamWorks did the simple math: cute cat + miniature swordsman = money.

The first solo spin-off, Puss in Boots (2011), grossed 555 million dollars and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It was a competent, fun movie, the kind that does the job without major ambitions. Nobody expected much from the sequel. Eleven years later, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) came out with 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, earned another Oscar nomination, and did the most unexpected thing possible for a DreamWorks movie about a talking cat: it became a meditation on death.

The villain is the Wolf, and the Wolf is literal Death, hunting down Puss in Boots because he has reached the last of his nine lives. The movie stopped to talk about panic attacks, about the fear of growing old, about the privilege of still being alive. All of this wrapped in an animation visually inspired by Into the Spider-Verse and spaghetti westerns. It was the most acclaimed animated spin-off of the decade, and proof that the industry, when it lets the material breathe, can produce art even in the middle of merchandising.

Oswald Cobb, the suited villain who became Gotham's Tony Soprano

Colin Farrell was buried under nearly four hours of facial prosthetics in The Batman (2022), playing a Penguin who appeared in three and a half scenes, spoke through a thick layer of latex, and left. It was meant to be a cameo. Mike Marino, the makeup artist, did such an incredible job that HBO looked at it, looked at the character's screen time, looked at the growth of streaming, and decided there was a miniseries right there.

The Penguin (2024) arrived and did what nobody expected: it treated a comic book villain with the seriousness of The Sopranos. Oswald Cobb became Oz, a rising gangster in post-trauma Gotham, with a sick mother, a dead brother, pathological ambition, and class resentment. Cristin Milioti, as Sofia Falcone, stood alongside him to form one of the most interesting dramatic duos in recent television history. The series finished with a 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with per-episode averages comparable to the best seasons of the prestige dramas from the previous decade, and a higher rating than the movie that spawned it.

Farrell and Milioti both won Golden Globes. The show received 24 Emmy nominations. The Penguin, who for eighty years was one of Batman's most ridiculed villains, became a character study worthy of a university thesis. When you get the tone right, even the guy with the umbrella can carry heavy dramatic weight.

Arthur Fleck, the Joker who won a Golden Lion and two Oscars

The Joker is, technically, the extreme case on this list: he was born in the comic books in 1940, spent eighty years as someone else's supporting villain, and in 2019 finally received a movie where Batman simply does not exist as an adult character. Todd Phillips took the material, stripped away the entire superhero structure, kept Gotham because the name sells, and crafted a character study about mental health, social isolation, and how societies produce violence when they decide that certain people do not deserve dignity.

Joker (2019) won the Golden Lion in Venice, grossed 1.079 billion dollars on a 55 million dollar budget, and took home two Oscars: Joaquin Phoenix for Best Actor and Hildur Guðnadóttir for Original Score. It received eleven nominations in total, including Best Picture.

People can debate forever whether the movie is as deep as it took itself to be, whether its political reading works, or if Phillips was playing with fire without understanding the heat. But the fact remains: for the first time, a supporting comic book villain won a major award at the Venice Film Festival.

Saul Goodman, the buffoonish lawyer who became an American tragedy

Bob Odenkirk was hired for just four episodes. He came from a comedy background, known for Mr. Show, and Vince Gilligan needed comic relief for the second season of Breaking Bad (2008). Saul Goodman entered, dropped his catchphrases, sold business cards with sketchy promises, brought the perfect tone of buffoonery, and was supposed to exit. He didn't. He became a series regular in the third season, a central figure in the fifth, and the joke that carried part of the dramatic weight of the show.

Then came Better Call Saul (2015), and what started as a comedic spin-off turned into one of the greatest tragedies ever filmed for television. Six seasons slowly and masterfully chronicled how Jimmy McGill became Saul Goodman, how Saul Goodman became Gene Takovic, and how every tiny decision made by a man who could not stop being exactly who he was slowly cemented his destiny. Every season of Better Call Saul holds an approval rating above 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the final three seasons hitting 99%.

The Television Academy, for reasons that defy rational comprehension, nominated the series 53 times for an Emmy and awarded it zero. This stands as the absolute negative record in the history of the awards. The Guardian and Empire consistently rank Better Call Saul among the best series ever made. Breaking Bad was a show about how an ordinary man transforms into a monster. Better Call Saul is about how an ordinary man slowly discovers he was already a monster. It is a spin-off that makes the original look a little shallower by contrast, which is perhaps the hardest thing to achieve in audiovisual media: taking someone else's masterpiece and building another masterpiece right beside it that complements the original without needing to compete.

Frasier Crane, the patriarch of all spin-offs

Kelsey Grammer joined Cheers (1982 to 1993) in its third season, playing Frasier Crane, a pompous psychiatrist and the romantic interest for Diane, the bar's intellectual waitress. It was a closed-arc role: date, marry, divorce, leave. He was a secondary character in an already crowded ensemble. Nobody imagined that this snob would anchor the longest-running, most awarded, and structurally most ambitious spin-off in the history of American sitcoms.

Frasier (1993 to 2004) lasted eleven seasons and 264 episodes. It won thirty-seven Primetime Emmys, an absolute record for a scripted series for over two decades, until Game of Thrones finally surpassed it in 2016. It won five consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Comedy Series between 1994 and 1998, a feat no other show has repeated. It earned 108 total nominations. Grammer won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series four times, becoming the only actor in history to be nominated for an Emmy for the same character across three different shows: Cheers, Wings (a crossover appearance), and Frasier.

But what makes Frasier the patriarch of this list is not the trophy count. It is the fact that the show invented a blueprint: it took a supporting character, moved him to a new city, built a fresh ensemble around him, maintained the essence of the personality the public loved in the original, and constructed something that connected with the previous universe without ever depending on it to survive. Frasier Crane was the first proof that a character spin-off did not have to be a parasite to the original, but could be an autonomous creation with its own life and rules.

Everyone else on this list descends from him. Saul Goodman, Oswald Cobb, Cassian Andor, they all exist because, back in 1993, a snobbish psychiatrist on NBC proved it could work. The industry learned from Frasier what it had been doing wrong for four decades. It learned, it got rich, and to this day, it applies that lesson with varying degrees of success.

What about you? Which supporting character do you think most deserved a spin-off?

If anyone says Joey Tribbiani from Friends, there will be a fight in the comments.

See you next time!