8 Comic Book Movies That Were Ruined By Terrible Plot Twists

Comic book movies have delivered some amazing plot twists over the decades. There have been surprising villain switcheroos (e.g. Iron Man, Batman Begins, Captain America: The Winter Soldier), shocking deaths (The Amazing Spider-Man 2, The Dark Knight, Logan) and revelations that turn the hero's story on its head (Wonder Woman, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2). All of these examples proved to enhance the story and lift the films up to another level in some way. Unfortunately though, for every successful plot twist we get, there's one that just plain stinks. A lot of the time these twists sounded like good ideas on paper but somewhere along the line they were poorly handled. Other times, the ideas were rotten from the beginning and you have to wonder what the filmmakers were thinking when they thought viewers would lap it up. Either way, these awful twists ended up damaging their movies as a whole. Sometimes the film was able to survive the blow and still be enjoyable, but mostly, these twists killed all the good will fans had beforehand. Be it the X-Men franchise, the DC Extended Universe or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, superhero movies of all kinds have served up some atrocious plot twists that would make even M. Night Shyamalan blush, and here are 8 of the absolute worst. 8) Cyclops Is Dead There are so many terrible plot developments in X-Men: The Last Stand that it's hard to pick the worst of the lot. With Brett Ratner helming the movie in place of Bryan Singer, the closer to the original X-Men trilogy is undoubtedly one of the most poorly written superhero movies out there, with so many elements that should have been shocking but end up being totally underwhelming or nonsensical. Could the worst plot twist be Mystique losing her powers and for some reason siding with the humans? How about Rogue getting cured, something that goes against the X-Men's central message of accepting your flaws? Or maybe it's the post-credits revival of Professor X which makes exactly zero sense? It's tough to choose just one, but we're going to plump for Cyclops' death. Jean Grey murdering her fiancee Scott Summers should have been a terrific moment which a) shockingly killed off one of the franchise's main characters and b) showed just how much Jean had changed now that she's Dark Phoenix. For unfathomable reasons, though, we don't even see the scene in full and Cyclops' death is treated as an afterthought. At least nowadays, thanks to Days of Future Past rewriting the timeline, The Last Stand has been stricken from continuity, so its stain on the franchise has been somewhat removed. 7) Joker Killed Batman's Parents Tim Burton's 1989 Batman movie took a lot of liberties with the previous fifty years of comic book history, but its biggest departure was the retcon that Jack Nicholson's Joker was the murderer of Bruce's parents. Within the film itself, this plot twist works very well, as it ties Batman and Joker's origins together and allows Keaton's murderous, vengeful Dark Knight to get his revenge for his parents' death. However, where it fails is in honoring the spirit of the characters from the comics. The Waynes are usually killed by a small-time hoodlum named Joe Chill. As depicted in Batman Begins, Chill is a symptom of a very sick city which leads to Bruce vowing to clean up the whole town. Giving him a clear foe to defeat to ease his pain and grief lessens the impact of his war on all crime in Gotham. In fact, it leaves you wondering why Batman doesn't just hang up his cowl at the end of the movie. Likewise, it also mapped out Joker's biography in contrast with the multiple choice past that the Clown Prince has always been depicted with in the source material. Subsequent versions of the character have understood this better, though Warner Bros. is about to open up another can of worms with its Joker origins movie. 6) Enchantress Is The Movie's Villain This one isn't so much of a plot twist within the film itself, as it becomes clear that Enchantress is the central villain of Suicide Squad fairly early on. However, the marketing for the third entry in the DCEU had led us to believe that Jared Leto's Joker would be the movie's big bad and that Enchantress would just be one of the members of Task Force X, as in the comics. Boy, how wrong we were. The result of this bait-and-switch was one of the worst superhero movie villains ever. In terms of her character, villainous scheme and performance, the Enchantress is undercooked, hokey and laughably bad. Plus, with hardly any screentime, Leto's Joker came across as a gimmick-laden pencil sketch of Mr. J, leaving Warner Bros. to contemplate alt-Jokers to rehabilitate the character. At least director David Ayer admitted to his mistake and has gone on record as saying he should have made the Joker the antagonist of the movie. Unfortunately, it's a little too late for that now, Dave. 5) Sandman Killed Uncle Ben Anyone remember that bit in Scream 3 where the rules of threequels are laid out? Jamie Kennedy's character explains that one of the tropes of threequels goes that new information will come to light that completely flips the established rules of the movie series on its head. Well, director Sam Raimi and his writing team apparently took this mocking deconstruction as a rule book when making Spider-Man 3. Notoriously, in a lazy bit of retconning, it's revealed that Flint Marko AKA Sandman is the true killer of Peter Parker's Uncle Ben and not that random carjacker from the first movie. Apparently, the police have known this for a while but, whoops, it slipped their minds to let the Parkers know. To be fair to the film, Sandman's portrayal is actually surprisingly tragic and effective, but the reveal of his past crimes feels forced and a little illogical. With his best friend Harry Osborn turning evil and being infected by the Venom symbiote, there were enough problems in Spidey's life to deal with in the movie without adding in this extra complication. 4) Bane Works For Talia Al Ghul One of the great strengths of the Dark Knight trilogy is its amazing villains. After Liam Neeson's Ra's al Ghul, Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow and, of course, Heath Ledger's Joker, Tom Hardy's turn as the formidable Bane in The Dark Knight Rises promised to be their equal. And he was... for the first three quarters of the movie. Unfortunately, a late-in-the-day rug-pull totally neutered the character. Rises had set up Bane as a lone wolf, Ra's al Ghul's son who had dragged himself out of the Pit, taken charge of the League of Shadows and basically single-handedly brought Gotham to its knees. It turns out, though, that he's just a lovesick stooge for Miranda Tate AKA Talia al Ghul - who's the real head of the League and the child that escaped from the Pit. Basically, Bane is just the muscle to a female supervillain. Exactly like he was in Batman & Robin. If handled well, this could have given us two great villains for the price of one. As it is, though, the twist does its best to ruin Bane and leave Marion Cotillard with little time to carve out an interesting antagonist. 3) Bruce Wayne Survived Sorry, The Dark Knight Rises. You're actually a pretty good movie, but you do have two really irritating plot twists. On top of the reveal that Bane isn't what he thought he was, the end of the film gives us a controversial ending for Bruce Wayne that just doesn't work on both a character-based and logical level. After apparently dying while disposing of a bomb to save Gotham, Alfred discovers Bruce living it up in Paris with Selina Kyle. Yes, some fans prefer to think of this as an Inception-like dream sequence but, let's face it, this was intended to be reality, so we have to treat it as that. While the idea to give Bruce a happy ending, by having him finally be able to move on with his life, is a good-natured one, it feels like a betrayal of Batman's core character that he would ever leave Gotham and, frankly, ever sort out his psychological hang-ups enough to lead a normal life. On top of that, fans have had to pick apart the logic of having Bats escape the nuclear explosion in tact ever since. As Robin put it, in Return of the Caped Crusaders: "Holy unsatisfying ending!" 2) Peter Was 'Destined' To Be Spider-Man When The Amazing Spider-Man rolled around, it was marketed as the "true" origin story of the hero. As it turned out, though, that movie didn't really offer up anything fresh and it wasn't until the sequel arrived that the truth was finally revealed. Unfortunately, it was really, really not worth the wait. It turns out that Peter Parker is the only person who could become Spider-Man. The genetically-engineered spiders are derived from Parker DNA, given from his father (who was killed by his old partner Norman Osborn). It's an infuriating twist as it needlessly meddles with a classic, pitch-perfect origin. Even more so than the Joker killing Batman's parents, making Peter a Chosen One type completely misinterprets the character. What's worse, the already-convoluted story was almost complicated further. A deleted scene for the movie would have seen Peter's dad inexplicably return from the dead! We've no idea what director Marc Webb and his team were going to do with that twist, but thankfully we never found out due to the cancellation of the Amazing franchise. 1) The Mandarin Isn't The Mandarin Yes, it's been four years now, but we're still not over what Iron Man 3 did to the Mandarin. Fans had been waiting for years to see Tony Stark's nemesis make it to the movies and, in the end, he was made into the butt of a joke with his legacy probably forever tarnished. What's so terrible about this plot twist is that, even more so than the Bane reveal, it tears up all the good work up to that point. For the first half of the movie, the Mandarin was a shoe-in to be one of the MCU's best villains... and then it's revealed that he's actually an actor, with Guy Pearce's forgettable Aldrich Killian pulling the strings. Sure, there's a valid argument to be made that Marvel could not simply lift the, let's face it, dated Asian stereotype of the Mandarin from the comics and had to find a way to reinterpret him. However, the problem is that they had already found a perfect way of doing that. At first, Kingsley's Mandarin seems to be a self-styled terrorist who's appropriated Asian culture for his own image. Though a subsequent One Shot mini-movie attempted to convince us that there was a real Mandarin still out there in the shadows, the damage had already been done. What a shame!