5 Comic Book Villains We Want To See In James Gunn's DC Universe

This year's "Superman" gave us one of the best ever adaptations of Lex Luthor, courtesy of actor Nicholas Hoult. But Lex is just the tip of the bad guy iceberg in DC Comics. "Superman" director and DC Studios President James Gunn has promised the new DC Universe will be "the biggest story ever told," and what is a story worth without some great villains?

DC Comics has struggled a fair bit with turning its superhero stable into blockbuster movie stars (Batman consistently excepted). That means many corners and characters of the DC Universe feel like untapped potential. Gunn featured Starro the Conqueror as the main threat of "The Suicide Squad," so let's keep that trend going and get other big DC villains onscreen, no matter how outlandish they might be.

Surveying the announced DC Studios slate of films and looking at the scant hints we've already gotten, here are five villains that would fit right in on the big-screen party Gunn is throwing. They're hardly overlooked in the comics, but that story is different on film — it's time to change it.

Gunn is working on another "Superman family" movie, which many have speculated will be a Superman (David Corenswet)/Supergirl (Milly Alcock) team-up movie. A making-of feature for "Superman" showed a sketch of Superman, Supergirl, and Krypto flying together ... while another sketch hinted at the bad guy they might face together.

The super-intelligent, green-skinned Brainiac should, without question, be the next "Superman" movie villain. Superman may have beaten one evil genius, but what about an evil genius with advanced alien technology, an army of cloned bodies, and superpowers all his own? That sounds like a job Superman would need to call in his cousin for help on.

Sometimes, Brainiac is a cyborg known as Vril Dox from planet Colu; other times, he's a Kryptonian artificial intelligence that survived the planet's destruction. What is consistent about Brainiac is that he has a nasty habit of "collecting" miniaturized cities — and destroying the planets they came from, all part of his goal to hoard every bit of knowledge in the universe.

It is way past time for Brainiac to be in a "Superman" movie. He's Superman's second greatest and most lethal foe after Luthor. Yet we've gone through three silver screen Superman actors (Christopher Reeve, Brandon Routh, and Henry Cavill) without them facing an incarnation of Brainiac. Let Corenswet's Clark be the one to break this baffling trend.

In "Creature Commandos," Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has a dark premonition of Pokolistanian Princess Ilana Rostovic (Maria Bakalova) laying waste to Earth and killing all of its heroes.

One of Rostovic's allies in this dark future is a sapient gorilla in golden armor and a red cape. His appearance goes unexplained, but comic fans know who that is: Grodd, the most devious ape villain in all of comics.

Grodd is a super-intelligent, talking, and psychic gorilla with a desire to displace humankind as Earth's dominant species. Sometimes he's depicted as a mutant aberration, while in other cases, he hails from a whole city of talking gorillas hidden in Africa. In any case, this "Creature Commandos" cameo should not be the end for Grodd in the DCU.

If you look past the talking ape ridiculousness (the very quality that might make Grodd interesting for Gunn), Grodd is one of the most intelligent and diabolical DC villains out there. The "Justice League" cartoon made Grodd (voiced by the late Powers Boothe) into one of its foremost villains, for he was a smooth-talking mastermind with a knack for wrapping others around his finger.

Grodd appeared on the CW's "The Flash" series, but a limited budget hampered how much the show could do with him. He needs a blockbuster to make it to his full glory in live-action, and Grodd could be one of cinema's great ape villains next to Koba (Toby Kebbell) or Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) from the "Planet of the Apes" films. The one possible hurdle is that Grodd is mostly an enemy of the Flash. Considering what a bomb the 2023 "Flash" movie was, the DCU might not want to introduce the Flash — and with him Grodd — so soon.

"The Brave and the Bold" is on track to be the first DCU Batman movie, one that will introduce moviegoers to Batman's son, Damian Wayne/Robin. (An animated "Dynamic Duo" movie, starring ex-Robins Dick Grayson and Jason Todd, will be DCU canon, so we can assume that this Batman has had at least three Robins.)

It'd be an unconscionable mistake to forget about the other side of Damian's family: his mother, Talia, and his grandfather, Ra's al Ghul. As with Catwoman, Batman has always had a conflicted foes/forbidden lovers dynamic with Talia. She's entranced by the Detective but still loyal to her father and his goals.

Ra's is an eco-terrorist who desires to remove most of the planet's population so he can lead it into a new age. He has many acolytes in the League of Assassins (or Shadows, depending on the version), but the one Ra's most wants as his right hand is Batman.

Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" used Ra's (Liam Neeson) and his League as its primary villains, reimagined as Bruce Wayne's mentor. But in those movies' commitment to realism, they stripped the fantasy out of one of Batman's most fantastical foes; comic Ra's is about 600-700 years old, sustaining himself with fountains of youth called the Lazarus Pit.

In the DCU, let's get the proper, truly immortal Ra's al Ghul this time (and cast an appropriate Arabic actor, too).

The last DC Universe on film tried to build up to a confrontation between the Justice League and Darkseid (Ray Porter), which wound up never paying off. Gunn has said the new DCU is not going to function as a saga(s) centered around a big bad villain, but take a more loose approach; different stories, same world. 

But if there is to be a string-pulling puppet master, one who could fit Gunn's decentralized structure is Vandal Savage. Born 50,000 years ago, the Cro-Magnon hunter who became Vandal Savage once spent a cold night sleeping near the heat of a crashed meteorite. The space rock radiated his cells, remaking him into an ageless immortal. Savage has been many of history's greatest villains, from Genghis Khan to Blackbeard. All of human history has his fingerprints across it. 

The DCU has promised a "new age of Gods and Monsters" ushered in by metahumans appearing centuries ago. So, go back to the original metahuman and use Savage as a recurring villain. The premise of Savage's character, an immortal caveman, is way more unique and fits Gunn's offbeat style better than another big alien invader like Darkseid (or the MCU's Thanos, for that matter). 

Gunn said he's taking influence from animated DC series like "Young Justice," which used Savage (initially the late Miguel Ferrer, later David Kaye) as its main villain. If it worked there, it can work again.

We're 17 years into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, centered around the Avengers, and somehow we still haven't seen the Masters of Evil, i.e., a group of the Avengers' greatest foes banding together as one to vanquish their common enemies.

So, here's one way the DCU can still beat its distinguished competition to the punch on something: the Legion of Doom, or several of the world's greatest villains (previously introduced in other movies) teaming up the way that many heroes do. Now, alliances of major villains have gone by a few different names in DC Comics, from the Injustice League (or Gang) to the Secret Society of Super-Villains.

But "Legion of Doom" has stuck due to the 1978 cartoon "Challenge of the Superfriends." The Legion were the series' main villains, dwelling in a skull-shaped evil lair hidden beneath a swamp, the dark mirrored image of the Superfriends' Hall of Justice. The Legion was depicted as an alliance of the world's 13 deadliest villains: Lex Luthor, Brainiac, Black Manta, Cheetah, the Riddler, Scarecrow, Sinestro, Solomon Grundy, Bizarro, Giganta, Grodd, Captain Cold, and the Toyman. 

We'll have to wait and see which A-List bad guys the DCU brings out in future films before we can envision a line-up for a live-action Legion of Doom. Hoult's Lex Luthor having a seat at the Legion's table, though, would already be assured.