10 Villains DC Movies Got Completely Wrong
Joel Schumacher isn't the only one guilty of this.
Superhero comic book adaptations can be notoriously tricky to pull off. What works on the page won't necessarily translate well to the screen, so filmmakers within this genre need to be creative in their interpretation of the subject matter.
This occasionally means deconstructing classic characters and remoulding them in a way that's a better fit for cinema, and Hollywood doesn't always get this right, especially when it comes to the villains.
Warner Bros' unofficially-named DC Extended Universe keeps making this mistake. Justice League was met with lacklustre reviews and one of the most frequent criticisms you'll hear is its interpretation of the main antagonist.
This is a problem that dates back not just to the early days of the franchise, but to much earlier DC films, ones that were released long before the cinematic universe model was apparently the only viable way to make comic book films.
Sure, there are many notable exceptions, from Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor to Heath Ledger's Joker, but the list of botched DC villains on the big screen seems to be growing, and there are some pretty bad offenders.
10. Lex Luthor (Batman V Superman)
Lex Luthor's plan to unleash Doomsday on Metropolis in Batman v Superman's final act was patently ridiculous, and was only ever going to result in him winding up in jail or going down with the stricken city.
Muddled motivation and plotholes big enough to fly a Kryptonian spacecraft through aren't the only reasons Jesse Eisenberg's take on the villain didn't work. This was a reinterpretation of an iconic character, but the vision underpinning it was uninspired.
Luthor, who is supposed to be cold, calculating and dignified in his evil genius, came across like an oddball mash-up of Mark Zuckerberg and Heath Ledger's Joker, and was ultimately none of those things.
No doubt Zack Snyder tried something different with the villain because there had already been two big-screen versions of him by this point, but there are so many aspects of traditional Luthor that this incarnation needed. More masculinity and less twitchy weirdness would have been a good start.
Presumably Warner is well aware of the negativity surrounding Eisenberg's portrayal, hence why they benched his character for most of Justice League.