Not every DC movie has an epic twist hiding in plain sight for the viewer, but the ones that do have left a major impact on the history of DC characters and even movies as a whole. Take Tim Burton’s Batman, for instance, which shifts the origins of the hero and The Joker to be far more intertwined than ever, with the pre-Joker Jack Napier being the gunman who killed Bruce’s parents. Christopher Nolan also found multiple surprises to hide in each of his films in The Dark Knight Trilogy. But for every foundational, great twist, there’s also a couple that stick out like sore thumbs.
The pool is limited for DC movie twists anyway, as the films seldom actually have a proper twist to be found. That said, these four are some of the worst to be found in the larger scope of DC Comics adaptations. Most of them aren’t even because the twist doesn’t make logical sense; in fact, they all largely fail at the same thing, undermining everything that came before them and making the movie overall weaker.
4) Miranda Tate Is Talia al Ghul in The Dark Knight Rises
To give credit to Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, The Dark Knight Rises at least structures its big twist about the real identity of Miranda Tate in a way that makes narrative sense. Introduced early as the new CEO of Wayne Enterprises, it’s not until the film’s final moments that we learn she’s actually the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul and the true mastermind of the attacks on Gotham City, not Bane, fulfilling her father’s master plan.
That said, the surprise reveal of Tate’s actual identity is one that undercuts Tom Hardy’s Bane and his larger presence in the entire film. From the opening sequence, it’s made to seem like Bane is the one pulling the strings, carrying out the orders, and even getting his own hands dirty to destroy Gotham and achieve the goals of the League of Shadows. In the end, he was just a lackey and a pawn, with even his origin story thrown to a different character as part of the larger twist. Despite trying to do right by the character of Bane after his poor portrayal in Batman & Robin, The Dark Knight Rises found a way to do him even dirtier; the film also failed to make Talia as compelling as her comic book counterpart to boot.
3) Superman’s Secret Kid in Superman Returns
Since Superman Returns is supposed to be a direct sequel to 1978’s Superman and 1980’s Superman II, the 2005 feature film makes big leaps in trying to make it all make sense. Among its new ideas is that Lois Lane has a son, Jason, who is revealed to be the offspring of her previous romance with Superman. It’s not a particularly profound twist when it’s revealed, as the movie itself flirts with it, perhaps not even being true, but in the end, it’s one that raises more questions than it answers.
In the end, the inclusion of Jason in Superman Returns was done to give the movie even more symmetry with Richard Donner’s two Superman films than it already had, most notably by giving Superman a chance to deliver the same soliloquy to his child that his father gave him in the first movie. But in doing this, and including the character at all, the film has written itself into a major corner that makes all of its characters inconsistent at best and poorly written at worst.
How does Lois not remember she had a relationship with Superman to create this child? How long was Superman away from Earth between the films for this to even make sense? Most importantly, why does Jason only exhibit his Kryptonian abilities when the movie most needs him to? Nonsense, the lot of it.
2) Ares’ Real Identity in Wonder Woman
The inclusion of Ares as the primary antagonist of Wonder Woman is one that makes sense for comic book readers. The DC heroine has long battled with the pantheon of Greek gods, Ares being one of her most formidable foes. That said, the way the character is handled in the 2017 feature film, and the full reveal of who he is done in a way that completely undercuts the entire narrative of the movie itself and Diana’s journey within it at the expense of making sure another major action beat can take place in this blockbuster.
When Diana leaves Themyscira with Steve Trevor and learns the reality of World War I, she becomes convinced that the German general Erich Ludendorff, with his nefarious plan,s is clearly Ares in disguise. Armed with a weapon that she believes can kill Ares, Diana makes it her mission to kill Ludendorff. When she finally accomplishes this task, though, things aren’t immediately better; she was wrong, and nothing has changed.
This moment shakes Diana’s entire belief system to its core. Her incorrect assumption makes her realize not only that the larger conflict cannot be ended by just killing one person deemed to be the “big bad” but that humanity itself is far more complicated than the whims of gods that may be influencing them. Then she gets to fire Ares in a big dumb fight; it’s a twist that erodes a lot of great potential from the film’s message. Had it gone a different direction, Wonder Woman would stand out even more from other superhero movies than it already does.
1) Almost Everything in Joker: Folie à Deux
In one way, you could look at the entirety of Joker: Folie à Deux as being a major twist, as it ended up taking on the form of a giant middle finger to viewers in a way that was not only poorly conceived but executed even worse. After the billion-dollar success of the 2019 feature film, a follow-up was inevitable, but the sequel that debuted is one that completely resented the success of the first film and attempted to make a point to treat its audience with contempt. There’s also the larger shift in the movie being a musical, with the delusions of Arthur and “Lee” taking on the form of giant set pieces akin to classic Hollywood movies.
To focus on a more specific twist that is quite terrible is the implication of the film’s ending, that Arthur Fleck was never the “Joker” from the Batman mythology at all, and was perhaps a victim of another madman who would adopt his motifs and become the villain. If everything preceding this moment in the film was a metaphorical flipping of the bird, then this final sequence is a blown raspberry as one final defiant act. Joker: Folie à Deux could never have lived up to the hype that surrounded the first movie, but it didn’t have to go out of its way to be a juvenile exercise in disdain.
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