These standards formed in large part because of Batman’s so-called rogues’ gallery: the comics industry’s best collection of colorful, disturbed, and eye-catching bad guys, attracting the attention of A-list performers at a time when superhero movies were far from a sure thing. This dynamic was firmly established in the Tim Burton Batman movies, where Michael Keaton gracefully underplayed opposite various alumni of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and quickly gave way to the “too many villains” problem, where producers attempted to give us too much of a good-bad thing. The Marvel Cinematic Universe model has become so dominant that it’s easy to forget how effectively it has dismantled a long-held superhero movie paradigm: That the hero with his (or her, but mostly his) name in the title would cede scene after scene to the starry, over-the-top antics of the movie’s villains. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos by DC Comics and Warner Bros.
