10 Iconic Villains Who Deserved Much Better Deaths

2. The Joker €“- The Dark Knight

By the end of The Dark Knight, we had a new piece in the jigsaw that made up Batman - he was the deliriously entertaining yin to his yang, and though he was ultimately disappointed when his explosive test didn't work out as he planned, there was no suggestion his incarceration would be anything like permanent.

But then real life horribly interfered, and we were forced to accept that not quite sufficient resolution as the definite full-stop to Nolan's flirtations with The Joker. The sorry result was that the character simply vanished - death by narrative ignorance.

He is never mentioned in Rises, and there's no attempt to explain the giant hole in the narrative he leaves, when it would have been fairly simple to write him out by staging his own escape when it becomes clear his arch-nemesis has retired.

How He Actually Deserved To Die

The Joker needed a resolution, whether that was death or something less definitive, but of course he was cruelly robbed of that by the tragic events that took Heath Ledger's life.

It was an impossible prospect, and actually killing The Joker might have caused more fan anger than the disappointment that came with his non-resolution, but Nolan's commitment to finality should have extended to give the clown prince of crime a fitting end.

That fitting end might have been for his grand boat scheme to backfire, and to poetically lead to his demise, or for Two Face to turn on him, still propelled by a fundamental hatred of criminality, which in turn would have made Dent's threat even more pronounced.