10 Greatest Batman Movie Villains Of All Time, Ranked

It’s not always exactly the case, but there’s typically a pretty firm correlation between how good a Batman movie is and the quality of the villains the Dark Knight faces. When it’s done right, the rogues’ gallery sends various dark mirrors of Bruce Wayne back at him: monsters twisted by vengeance or trauma or poverty or darkness - all of the ingredients that made him pull the cowl on in the first place.

When things go wrong for Batman villains, it tends to be an issue with tone, as Joel Schumacher found out repeatedly (though Jim Carrey’s Riddler comes closer to the top 10 overall than a lot of people might be comfortable with). The problem there is that Batman is based on a cartoonish idea, but to pull it off, he has to be treated with utmost sincerity and seriousness. Otherwise you get a cod-pieced Arnold Schwarzenegger firing god-awful puns at machine-gun pace. And nobody wants that.

For all the Bat’s evil diversity, the directors behind the nine solo live-action Batman movies (not including the serials or the DCEU team-ups) have actually stuck with a fairly familiar bunch of villains. We’ve seen the likes of Clayface, Phantasm, Deathstroke, Black Mask, Harley Quinn, Killer Croc and various others in non-Batman movies (or in animation only), but the cinematic rogues’ gallery has seen multiple Jokers, multiple Penguins, multiple Catwomen, three Riddlers, two Banes, and two Two-Faces. There have been others, of course, but it feels rather like there’s more potential to broaden things out.

Before The Batman Part 2 adds more villains to the mix - including, reportedly, the debut of The Court of Owls - now is the perfect time to look back on the best live-action Batman movie villains so far.

Honorable Mention: Colin Farrell's Penguin - The Batman

Colin Farrell's Penguin - Oz Cobb, man of the people, to give him his true name - isn't actually in The Batman enough to qualify as a truly great movie villain, but he was so great in his own spinoff series that it feels like an oversight to not give him a nod here. Part Tony Soprano and part Macbeth, he's a power-hungry, working-class monster who imagines himself as an antihero, and hides fiercely sharp intellect behind his disarming appearance. Hopefully, we'll get to see more of him actually sparring with Robert Pattinson's Batman, but even if we don't, HBOs' The Penguin series was a masterpiece.

10 Christopher Walken's Maximillian Shreck - Batman Returns

A rare example of a villain created specifically for the movies, Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck was a great addition to Tim Burton’s grotesque circus of Gotham. The ruthless industrialist is at the heart of Batman Returns, and stands strong, despite the presence of two far more cartoonish, brilliant villains (more of whom soon). Cleverly, he’s sort of a proto-Court of Owls, showing the corrupt underbelly of Gotham that creates the monsters Batman battles.

It’s Shreck who creates Catwoman by “killing” Selina Kyle, and it’s his scheming that pushes Oswald Cobblepot into his mayoral race: he’s basically the grand manipulator. Walken’s performance is chilling and precise, and far more memorable than it has any right to be, given the competition.

9 John Turturro's Carmine Falcone - The Batman

While he’s another human, rather than a superhuman, John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone is a monster of the same magnitude as Max Shreck, pulling the strings from Gotham’s underworld. He’s compelling precisely because he avoids the pomp and circumstance of the more theatrical villains: he’s more of a calculating puppet master, who perversely holds Gotham together, as The Penguin subsequently revealed after his death.

Turturro makes Falcone a subtle but completely convincing threat, who hides an even darker undercurrent that comes out only in flashes. His tense interactions with Selina Kyle in particular are a masterclass, and there’s a compelling oddness to his performance that reveals the mask just enough.

8 Tom Hardy's Bane - The Dark Knight Rises

©Warner Bros.

Putting aside all of the nonsense about his vocal performance, Tom Hardy’s Bane achieves exactly what the villain needs to: offering both a legitimate physical threat and a convincing psychological one to Bruce Wayne. For the role, Hardy packed on muscle, and there was no doubting that this was a man who could break even the Dark Knight over his knee.

There’s a pleasant commitment to the theatrical in his performance too (and yes, I count the voice in that as a positive), and he has a real sense of ceremony in his plans to take down Bruce Wayne. He does, admittedly, lose something when it’s revealed he’s no more than Talia Al Ghul’s sidekick, but up to that point, he’s golden.

7 Aaron Eckhart's Two-Face - The Dark Knight

He’s only actually on-screen in full villain form for a short amount of time, but Aaron Eckhart’s transition from Gotham’s crusading White Knight into the vengeful, deranged monster by the end of The Dark Knight is a complete story, rather than two distinct ones. It’s the only real time we get to see a villain’s origin play out in detail, and Eckhart’s tragic fall from grace is deeply compelling.

As Dent, he’s the perfect picture of moral integrity, but then as the deformed angel of death, he’s far better than the pantomime clown Tommy Lee Jones made Two-Face in Batman Forever. He’s a picture of pain and rage, which is helped enormously by the excellent design of his scarred face, and though he’s not around long as the coin-flipping maniac, he certainly burns bright.

6 Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow - The Dark Knight Trilogy

In a weird alternate universe, Nicolas Cage was the first actor to play Scarecrow in a Batman movie, and we can all be thankful that didn’t happen, because it might have stopped us getting Cillian Murphy's Dr. Jonathan Crane. So cherished was the disarmingly good-looking monster that he was the only villain to appear in all three entries of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.

Despite the almost supernatural way the character is traditionally portrayed, Murphy brought a disquieting composure to his version of Scarecrow, which was all the more creepy for its restraint. He’s a villain hidden in respectable plain sight, whose transformation completely sells the terror of his fear toxin, and reveals the true scale of his monstrous fetish for fear.

5 Paul Dano's Riddler - The Batman

Jim Carrey’s Riddler gets too much hate, but when he’s put side-by-side with Paul Dano’s far more understated manipulator, the comparison really doesn’t help Carrey’s case. Matt Reeves’ version is the ideal adaptation of Edward Nashton for the modern digital era, reframing him as a political firebrand and haunter of dark web forums filled with like-minded radicals. He’s more like a Zodiac or John Doe-like serial killer than the intellectual tease of the comics, but it’s an inspired reimagining.

Dano flips from cool, calculating psychopath to unhinged intensity, and is all the more complex because he believes he’s just like Batman. It’s hard to resist conceding that he’s at least partly right about some of Gotham’s problems too, which is always a good way to add complexity to any villain.

4 Jack Nicholson's Joker - Batman

The fact that we’ve arrived at Jack Nicholson’s Joker before the top three says everything you need to know about the quality on show on the top rungs of Batman’s movie rogues gallery. Jack Napier is a grotesque delight, monstrously overblown and theatrical, with a deliciously mean streak and a performative kink that’s very hard to resist. He’s a homicidal maniac, but without the nihilistic joy for chaos that came with Heath Ledger’s later version.

The decision to make Napier the killer of Bruce Wayne’s parents was a little convenient, but it at least wrapped the Joker and Batman up even tighter. And it meant Nicholson’s mangled psychopath could have a little more fun with Bats. Like the very best villains, he’s eminently quotable - particularly that line about dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight - and it’s very clear Nicholson was having a blast playing him.

3 Danny DeVito's Penguin - Batman Returns

Danny DeVito’s Oswald Cobblepot is almost the perfect Tim Burton Batman character: he’s tragic and odd and marked by trauma, and there’s a timeless sort of Universal monster charm about him that defies how grotesque he is. It’s so Burtonesque to cherry pick the gentleman mobster elements from the comics, but to turn Cobblepot into a sewing-dwelling mutant rejected by his wealthy parents. He’s a dark inversion of Batman in that respect, of course.

DeVito’s grim performance is beautifully monstrous and punctuated both by profound sadness and animal rage, and the incredible practical makeup and costume design is prime Burton imagination on show. DeVito absolutely disappeared into the role with feral commitment, and years on, you can still see why Warner Bros was so affected by the black-bile spewing mutant they had to try to market to kids.

2 Heath Ledger's Joker - The Dark Knight

For many, Heath Ledger’s Joker is the pinnacle of Batman’s movie villains, and honestly, on any given day, the top three is quite interchangeable. There is obviously no question of how good the performance was, nor how shocking, given the early reaction to his casting. Shows what the hysterical masses know, eh?

Ledger completely disregarded both Cesar Romero and Nicholson’s previous performances, reimagining the Joker as an enigmatic anomaly with a shifting origin, no obvious motive, and no fear. His tics suggest idiosyncratic vulnerabilities, but there’s no saying they’re anything more than affectations of theatricality, designed to make his terrifying capacity for evil more shocking.

1 Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman - Batman Returns

Just as DeVito’s Penguin is an archetype of Tim Burton’s gallery of monsters, Michelle Pfeiffer is the poster girl for his cabinet of broken dolls. She’s a supernatural mystery, resurrected from death and clad in an instantly iconic, BDSM-inspired vinyl catsuit stitched together to resemble a Frankenstein-like creation. She’s fascinating in every scene, intoxicatingly vampish and gothic, and laser-targeted on the strange pulse inside Batman’s head that drew him to his own weird alter ego.

Pfeiffer’s Catwoman was an urgent expression of female rage without ever gathering the kind of emasculated anxiety that would follow this kind of character in the age of the internet. She’d also a genuine threat to Batman and Bruce Wayne without ever having to rely on the physical prowess that she proves she’s capable of, and the subplot that ties them together romantically is a great touch. The commentary in that plot line about trauma attracting trauma is about as deep as Batman movies have ever gotten.

In short, Catwoman is absolutely captivating, incredibly cool, and the fact that she didn’t get her own antihero solo movie (which Burton did originally plan to make) is one of the biggest tragedies in DC movie history.