The 6 Best DC Movie Opening Shots, Ranked
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Opening shots are absolutely crucial in movies. They’re meant to hook you into the story instantly and establish the core rules and tone of everything that follows. And if the filmmakers get it right, they know the audience is theirs for the next two hours. That’s exactly why an opening is usually one of the best sequences in any movie.
And a good opening is even more important for the superhero genre, which is built on scale and spectacle. The genre has consistently delivered banger openings year after year, and DC has had more than its fair share. Today, we’re sifting through the DC movies and bringing you some of the greatest openings they’ve ever delivered.
6 ‘The Batman’ (2022)
A lot of people praise the opening sequence where Batman (Robert Pattinson) reflects on his second year as a vigilante in a rain-soaked, crime-ridden Gotham City on Halloween night. But that’s not how the movie opens. It actually opens with a claustrophobic POV of a masked figure, breathing heavily, stalking a family through binoculars. At first, you think it’s Batman scouting a criminal. Then a young boy comes out dressed in a red ninja costume, practicing martial arts moves with a toy sword, and you go, oh no, is that Bruce Wayne? Are they doing his parents’ murder again? Then you realize it’s none of those things.
It was actually the Riddler’s POV (Paul Dano), and you’d been watching him stalk his first victim, the Mayor of Gotham. These subtle misdirections, one after another, were so damn good. Then the Riddler steps out of the shadows, murders the Mayor in cold blood, and wraps his face in tape. This wasn’t the huge spectacle opening we’ve come to expect from the superhero genre. But it perfectly established the film’s slow-burn psychological horror tone and painted Gotham as a city drowning in crime and corruption, where not even the Mayor is safe in his own home.
5 ‘Watchmen’ (2009)
Watchmen opens in an alternate-history 1985 with the murder of an aging vigilante called the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). It’s filmed in Zack Snyder’s hallmark slow-motion style and meticulously choreographed to Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.” The Comedian is alone in his high-rise New York apartment when a mysterious, super-strong intruder breaks in, and the two erupt into a fierce hand-to-hand fight.
The Comedian is absolutely overpowered. The apartment gets destroyed. And blood flies through the air and splatters perfectly across a yellow smiley-face pin resting on his counter, recreating the iconic imagery from the comics. The sequence ends with the attacker throwing Blake through a glass window and sending him plummeting to the pavement below, which sets up the murder mystery that drives the entire movie.
4 ‘Superman’ (2025)
Superman opens in the most comic book way it possibly could. We’re in the Antarctic snow, and a timeline of on-screen text walks you through the new DCU and Superman’s (David Corenswet) story so far. Three centuries ago, the first metahumans appeared. Three decades ago, Clark arrived on Earth. Three years ago, he revealed himself to the world as Superman. Three hours ago, the Hammer of Boravia attacked. And three minutes ago, Superman lost a battle for the first time.
It establishes the stakes so much better than any origin montage or fight sequence ever could. Usually, you’d establish the status quo, and then move to the conflict where Superman loses his first fight. But James Gunn straight up opens the movie with its aftermath! Immediately after, Superman crash-lands in the snow, bloody, whistling for Krypto while the Superman theme swells up behind him, and it instantly hypes you up for the rest of the movie.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Fandom Should You Join? Harry Potter · Lord of the Rings · Star Wars · Star Trek
Eight honest questions about how you actually are: what you put on when you need cheering up, how deep you go into the things you love, what you argue about, what you keep on your shelf. Answer them and we will tell you where you belong. Four of the biggest fandoms on earth are taking new members, and they could not be more different from one another.
⚡Harry Potter(Wizarding World)
💍Lord of the Rings(Middle-earth)
⚔️Star Wars(A Galaxy Far Away)
🖖Star Trek(The Final Frontier)
01
What do you put on when you need cheering up? Nobody is brave about this one.
02
How deep do you go into something you love? There is no shallow end here, only different deep ends.
03
What do you and your friends actually argue about? Every fandom has one argument it has been having for years.
04
How do you feel about a room full of strangers? Every one of these comes with a very big room.
05
Where would you rather spend a week? Pick on instinct rather than on budget.
06
What do you believe about people, mostly? All four of these stories have an answer, and they disagree.
07
What is actually on your shelf? Look over at it before you answer.
08
What do you actually want from a story? Eight questions in, this is the one that picks your fandom.
Membership Confirmed Your Fandom Is…
Four of the largest communities on the planet, and four completely different reasons to belong to one. Here is yours, what it would give you, and the argument you would be having within a week.
Harry Potter
You belong to the fandom that is really about comfort. Hogwarts works on people because it is a place rather than a plot, and the pull is not the wizard war so much as the corridors, the food, the weather and the sense that somebody is expecting you.
- You are drawn to belonging, which is why this fandom sorted itself into houses within about five minutes and has never stopped.
- This is the most social of the four, and the one most likely to know which type every single person in your life would be.
- The books are built to be reread rather than analysed, and rereading is exactly what you do with things you love.
- The new HBO series is bringing the whole thing back one book at a time, which means the arguments are about to start all over again.
Lord of the Rings
You belong to the deepest fandom on this list, the one where somebody has always read further than you and is quietly delighted to say so. Middle-earth rewards patience more than any other world in popular culture.
- You like the sense that the story you are reading is only the visible part of something enormous, which is precisely how Tolkien built it.
- This fandom takes adaptation seriously to a degree that other fandoms find slightly alarming, and it has good reasons for that.
- Your favourite thing about the books is probably the bit that is not action at all, which is the walking, the songs and the long goodbyes.
- Nobody here thinks heroism belongs to the powerful, and the whole story exists to make that argument.
Star Wars
You belong to the loudest and largest tent of the four, the one where three generations are all watching the same thing and none of them agree about any of it. That disagreement is not a flaw in this fandom, it is the main activity.
- You want something you can share with absolutely everybody, from a six year old to a grandparent, and this is the only one on the list that really does that.
- Nobody argues like Star Wars fans argue, and the argument has been running since roughly 1980 with no sign of resolution.
- The pull here is sensory before it is narrative, since it is the sound design, the score and the look of a used and dented galaxy.
- You would be first in the queue, in costume, with strong opinions and a genuinely good time.
Star Trek
You belong to the thinking fandom, the one that turns up for the argument rather than the explosion. Trek has always been a series of ethical problems in space, and the people who love it love being asked what they would have done.
- You are an optimist in a way that is currently unfashionable, and this is the only major franchise still willing to say the future might be better.
- The best episodes are the ones where nobody fires anything, which is a sentence that makes perfect sense to this fandom and to nobody else.
- Starfleet Academy brought the franchise back to a classroom in 2026, which is appropriate, because Trek has always been a bit of a seminar.
- You would want the conversation afterwards more than the episode itself, and here you will always find somebody willing to have it.
3 ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ (2012)
The Dark Knight Rises opens at thousands of feet in the air with Bane (Tom Hardy) sitting in a CIA plane, hooded and chained. But you quickly realize he’s not a prisoner. He let himself get caught on purpose, because he needed to extract a high-value target who also happened to be on this plane. The CIA agent asks what the next step of his master plan is, and Bane looks up and calmly says, “Crashing this plane... with no survivors!” Suddenly, a massive transport plane drops out of the sky above them. Four mercenaries rappel down and rip the CIA plane in half. And they just hold it there, nose down, hanging from their own plane.
Shootouts and fistfights break out inside the cabin, and Bane manages to kill them all. And then, he even goes so far as to leave one of his own men behind so the body count matches the flight manifest. Bane escapes with his target and the rest of his team out the back of the fuselage as the plane breaks apart and crashes into the mountains. Christopher Nolan used real aircraft and practical stunt work, so it obviously looks insanely good. But it also establishes Bane as someone Batman (Christian Bale) has never really faced before, a villain who’s just as smart as he is, and a lot stronger.
2 ‘The Suicide Squad’ (2021)
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The movie’s very first shot starts on a puddle’s reflection in a prison yard and tilts up to show Savant (Michael Rooker). He’s bouncing a rubber ball off the walls and floor with pinpoint accuracy, hitting marked “X” targets, and the ball lands right back in his hand. A small yellow canary flies into his cell, and Savant purposely bounces the ball around the room one last time, striking and killing the bird.
From there, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) recruits him, and the movie transitions to the hilarious plane sequence where the squad of misfits meets each other for the first time. And it leads to the iconic bait-and-switch in Corto Maltese, where almost every character is wiped out in the first 10 minutes. It was completely unexpected, and it quickly established that this wasn’t going to be your typical superhero story and that no one was safe.
1 ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
The Dark Knight begins with one of the best heist sequences ever filmed. The camera zooms into a glass skyscraper, a window shatters from the inside, and two men in clown masks use a zip-line to launch themselves across to the roof of Gotham National Bank. Meanwhile, a van screeches up to a street corner, where a man holding a clown mask is waiting. He hops in, and the men inside start talking about the man who planned the heist, the one they call Joker (Heath Ledger).
The crew storms the bank and begins the heist, but they also start methodically taking each other out, just like they’ve been ordered. Each one thinks he’s removing the weak link so there’s a bigger share for everyone else. None of them knows someone else is ready to take them out too. It continues until there’s just one of them left, and the getaway driver arrives in a school bus and shoots the last guy, revealing himself to be the Joker. He places a smoke grenade tied to a pin in the bank manager’s mouth, steps onto the school bus filled with millions of dollars in mob money, and pulls out into a line of identical school buses as the police sirens approach. It’s widely considered one of the greatest openings of all time across any genre.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.