7 of our all-time favorite film versions of Batman supervillains

The Joker (The Dark Knight)

Save the best for last, as they say.

When Christopher Nolan took over the Batman franchise, he made a concerted effort to create a serious drama out of the existing comic book story lines and characters. for the most part, he was successful, but most of his success was in casting the late Heath Ledger in the iconic role of The Joker. To this day his portrayal of this supervillain is the gold standard in DCEU, and in my opinion no one has even come close to it before or since.

Ledger gave The Joker a real sense of psychotic behavior that we hadn’t seen up to this point. Jack Nicholson’s Joker definitely has his moments, because Nicholson is naturally kind of a psycho dude. But Ledger got inside the person behind The Joker, giving him some very real humanity in spite of his ruthless behavior. And unlike most of these other villains, we actually never know that much about who this guy is. In the beginning he starts to tell a gut-wrenching story to Rachel Dawes that seems to explain why he is this way, but then that ends up not actually being true… maybe? There are a lot of moments like that with this Joker, when he seems to make himself even slightly vulnerable, which both draws his victim and the audience in, like a bug into a Venus fly trap.

Next: 25 things you didn't know about Wonder Woman

Josh Gad is potentially entering into a long line of classic supervillains, but he’s in good company. If there’s anything we can take away from the last several decades of Batman, if Gad puts his own personal weird flair into Oswald Cobblepot, we might have another brilliant Penguin to contend with in the near future.