The villains in Batman movies usually die - and badly - but here’s the worst death of them all. Since Tim Burton’s 1989 blockbuster, Batman has starred in seven solo films with the eighth - Matt Reeves’ The Batman starring Robert Pattinson as the Dark Knight - arriving in 2021. Not only has Batman been rebooted multiple times with different directors behind the camera and different actors donning the cowl, but he has also faced every major villain in his rogue’s gallery, and most of them have perished onscreen.
Batman 1989 set the precedent for his Big Bads dying as opposed to the Dark Knight dragging them to prison or Arkham Asylum and, in some cases, Batman kills his enemies himself (directly or indirectly). That isn’t to say every arch-criminal dies after facing Batman; in fact, some did get hauled off to face justice from Gotham’s legal system: The Riddler (Jim Carrey) in Batman Forever and Batman & Robin’s dastardly duo Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) were all locked up in Arkham; though it’s not clear what became of Bane (Jeep Swenson), he didn’t die and was last seen emaciated after being deprived of Venom. Amazingly, the Joker (Heath Ledger) survived in The Dark Knight though the Oscar-winning actor’s tragic death meant his iconic version of the Clown Prince of Crime couldn’t return for The Dark Knight Rises. Additionally, every version of Catwoman lives to tempt Batman another day.
It’s probably not surprising that Batman’s grotesque villains usually meet gruesome ends. After all, the baddies don’t just try to take down Batman and instead, nearly all of them threatened the lives of millions of innocent Gotham citizens with their schemes. Fittingly, the justice meted out by the Batman movies tends to be definitively final and no villain - except Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) in The Dark Knight trilogy - has ever returned for a rematch with Batman (at least, not before the inevitable reboot). But while most of Batman’s movie villains died in ghastly ways, here’s who suffered the most anticlimactic on-screen death.
The Gory Villain Deaths In Tim Burton’s Batman Movies
As befitting the Gothic and fantastical worlds Tim Burton created in Batman and Batman Returns, his villains died in grisly fashion, starting with the Joker (Jack Nicholson), who plummeted to his death from a helicopter hovering above Gotham Cathedral. It’s a horrible way to die, but then again, Joker tried to poison Gotham with Smylex gas and he personally killed his mentor Boss Carl Grissom (Jack Palance) with multiple gunshots before he indifferently murdered his own helper, Bob the Goon (Tracy Walter).
Still, Batman Returns topped Joker’s death with the inventively sickening ways the Penguin (Danny DeVito) and Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) were offed: Oswald Cobblepot repulsively died from swallowing goops of toxic waste while Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) unleashed her vengeance on Shreck, her former boss, by electrocuting him until there was nothing left but a smoking skeleton. Prior to this, Selina Kyle herself may have also died after Shreck shoved her out of his skyscraper window before she was revived by an army of cats. Burton set the stage for gruesome deaths in superhero movies early on, but the way the villains died in his movies weren’t the worst.
Only One Villain Died In Joel Schumacher’s Batman Movies
In order to make Batman more family-friendly (and to sell more toys), director Joel Schumacher made Batman Forever much more cartoonish, which meant that the Riddler survived at the end of the film. However, like Joker, Harvey Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) also fell to his death when Batman (Val Kilmer) threw a handful of dollar coins at him, forcing Two-Face to lose his balance and plummet to his doom. While Harvey’s death wasn’t as graphic as Joker’s, both Batman and the movie itself treated Two-Face’s demise as an afterthought. It was something that needed to be done in order to conclude the story arc, but it wasn’t satisfying in any way, shape, or form.
In Batman & Robin, it’s not clear if Dr. Pamela Isley actually died from exposure to plant chemicals and getting swallowed by the earth, which transformed her into Poison Ivy. But her vengeance on her nemesis, Dr. Jason Woodrue (John Glover), started off with the pleasure of a kiss before he died in excruciating pain from toxic poisoning. It was a logical conclusion considering Poison Ivy is, well, Poison Ivy, but neither of these deaths in Schumacher’s movies were the Batman movies’ worst deaths.
Bane & Talia In The Dark Knight Rises Are The Worst Villain Deaths
Christopher Nolan kicked off his more grounded Dark Knight trilogy with Batman Begins, which concluded with Batman (Christian Bale) infamously refusing to save Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson) from a horrific death via train crash/explosion. According to Batman himself, he doesn’t kill Ra’s al Ghul, but instead, he chooses not to save him, thus making Ra’s’ death his own fault. Then, in The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent/Two-Face (Aaron Eckhart) again dies from falling after Batman tackled him to save James Gordon’s (Gary Oldman) son - although Dent didn’t drop nearly as far as his predecessor in Batman Forever did, he perished just the same.
While Harvey Dent’s death was unremarkable, it pales in comparison to the worst Batman villain deaths of all: Bane (Tom Hardy) and Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard) in The Dark Knight Rises. Bane, who was already in tears after Talia revealed their past relationship to Batman, was suddenly shot and blown across the room by Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) using the Batpod’s guns. Then, after a chase around Gotham’s streets, Talia merely dies from injuries accrued when her truck crashed after the road collapsed beneath it. Considering how Bane and Talia occupied Gotham for five months and planned to destroy it with a nuclear weapon, their ignominious deaths are the epitome of anticlimactic.
Next: Every Batman Movie Ranked, Worst To Best
