This Is the Best DC Comics Movie of All Time

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 15, 8:30AM EDT

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The first DC Comics came out in 1937. Movies based on these characters have had huge success. Today, the franchise is owned by Warner Bros., which is part of the Warner Bros. Discovery median giant. Warner Bros. is among America’s most storied studios and has been owned by several media companies over time.

DC Comics has produced many fictional characters. The best known of these are Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. Each has become part of a movie series of its own.

Several movies that have been successful are loosely tied to the DC franchise. On a related note, 2002’s “Road to Perdition” and David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” were both based on DC properties, a fact perhaps not generally known. Meanwhile, recent classics such as 2019’s “The Joker” and 2022’s “The Batman” are not technically considered to be part of the DC Extended Universe (DCEU). As it just so happens, they are also some of the most beloved DC-based films of the past decade. Does anyone notice a trend here?

To spell it out, it would appear that most of the best DC efforts are the ones that don’t try to take on the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) directly. The few exceptions would be 2017’s “Wonder Woman” and “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” the latter of which may or may not be as good as its devoted fan base would have one believe. Otherwise, the DCEU has consistently struggled to land emotional punches or tell gripping stories without resorting to overwrought melodrama. Compare that to the MCU, which balances comedy and drama while generating genuine pathos for its myriad characters.
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To determine the best DC Movie of all time, 24/7 Tempo created an index of average user ratings on IMDb, an online movie and TV database owned by Amazon, and average audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator, scaled to take into account the varying number of votes across the movies in our database. This combined rating was then averaged with the Rotten Tomatoes critic rating to obtain each film’s 24/7 Tempo index score. The rankings included all animated and live-action feature films based on DC Comics publications, including DC imprints.

The best DC movie of all time is “The Dark Knight.” It was released in 2008, directed by Christopher Nolan and stars Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart and Michael Caine. Here are the details:

IMDb rating: 9.0 (2,561,375 votes)
RT audience rating: 94% (1,831,566 votes)
Tomatometer rating: 94% (346 votes)

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Click here to see which are the best DC comic movies of all time.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.