When people say they love superhero movies, what they really mean is they love the people in superhero movies. Yes, the special effects and the powers and colorful costumes and the blue lasers in the sky are fun. But all the blue lasers in the sky are meaningless if you don’t care about the people punching those blue lasers. (That’s how you beat a blue laser, right? You punch it? Can you believe I didn’t take a single science class in college? Liberal arts, baby!)
Obviously those people are a combination of creative elements; the script, the director, and decades of comic-book lore. But the most important contribution comes from the actors and actress themselves, the ones who take that mythology and that screenplay and those directions and distill them into an unforgettable onscreen performance.
Today we’re honoring the best of those actors with a list of finest performances from the history of DC Comics movies. They range from scene-stealing supporting turns to critically acclaimed leading roles. They’re mostly live-action, but there are a couple voice performances as well, because some of the best theatrical DC adaptations over the last 40 years are animated. Some go back decades to the early days of the superhero movie boom others are very recent and hail from the new DC Universe. One or two actors have even won Academy Awards in DC films.
Without further ado, here are the 12 best performances in DC Comics movies…
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