20 DCEU villains ranked by sort of scary to absolutely sinister

18. General Zod

Looking back at the villains of the DCEU, we should all remember the fact that General Zod was officially the first of the batch. As the main villain of Man of Steel, he is the bad guy going up against Henry Cavill’s Superman. Too bad some of us (me) forgot all about him until we did a recent rewatch of the movie.

Unfortunately for General Zod, as a villain, his motives are never fully explained, leading us to almost wonder what his problem was (we know he wanted to reshape Krypton into a perfect place, but not really why he was trying to destroy Earth). In terms of his strength and power, there was a lot of potential there to make him a truly well-established bad guy of the DCEU, but it just never really happens.

I always had high hopes for General Zod because he was a Kryptonian just like Superman, and is perhaps one of the superhero’s best-known villains. I was expecting their battle to be legendary and their story to be one that had me questioning who would win. Plus, my hope was always that we would understand exactly what made General Zod tick.

In the end, General Zod was never delved into enough to make us care about his villainous mission. And it doesn’t help that his death is so violent that it was more about shocking people than anything else. The only thing that makes Zod redeemable as one of the DC villains is the fact that going up against him helped Superman develop more as a character. Otherwise, it might have been another case of wasting an excellent comic villain.