Big Bad Wannabe / The DCU

The DCU

Seemingly serious threats who fail to measure up on supposed threat level in this Shared Universe setting.

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Comic Books

Comic Books

• Astro City:
  • In the "Dark Age" arc, The Platypus pushes himself as a major crime boss when he's really a low-level hood made good and nowhere near as competent as he thinks. That's proven when he ends up taken down in a coup by his own supposedly silent underling who becomes The Deacon who will continue to rule the Astro City Underworld into the 2000s.
  • An even better example is a one-shot on Major Domo, who captures a bunch of "sideliners" (people with powers who don't wear costumes) to turn them into his army. He ends up beaten badly as they rebel with one pointing out to this moron that "major domo" is the title of a servant, not a master.
• Batman
  • Hush never learns. A brilliant surgeon who knows the secret of the Bat's true identity, he has a habit of gathering A-list bad guys to do his bidding and likes bragging to them that HE is not the type to fool around. Yet, he's eventually revealed for what he truly is: Bruce Wayne's petty and moderately effective Troll who gets the credit for plans that are mostly others' and left on his own, an Anti-Climax Boss. To put it short: Bane, Hush isn't.
  • Ignatius Ogilvy aka "Emperor Penguin" had this as his primary motivation. His father was a henchman who was murdered in front of him when he was a kid. Ever since then Ignatius has been trying to prove that he could be more than a mere henchman and be a Big Bad in his own right. Ignatius briefly manages to oust Penguin and even beats up Batman in a fight after taking some Super Serum, but he goes down quickly enough after Batman and Penguin team up to beat him.
  • Several other stories state that The Mafia is this compared to the supervillains. The Long Halloween in particular has Gotham's transition from mundane to metahuman crime as its backdrop, culminating in the seemingly-untouchable Carmine Falcone, a Karma Houdini for decades in-universe, being nonchalantly executed by Two-Face. A common source of angst for Batman is wondering whether he actually made Gotham worse by attracting super-crime to it.
  • Grant Morrison's run features the Black Glove, an evil club of various influential people, including among others a US Senator, an Italian Cardinal, and one of the most beloved charity activists in the world, who happens to be Bruce Wayne's current girlfriend. They think they're the ultimate villains that not even the great detective Batman can defeat and that they're too powerful and influential to be punished even if they were to be apprehended - one of them boasts that the seven core members between them have literally bribed every court of law on the face of the Earth. In reality, they're just a bunch of rich pricks who have to hire supervillains to get anything of real substance done. Their big Evil Plan concludes with the Batfamily crippling their organization and the Joker slaughtering them in the most comically undignified manner possible. Their leader, Doctor Hurt, enjoys his Hannibal Lectures that he knows Batman perfectly and can destroy him easily, but it just makes it even more obvious when he gets thoroughly Out-Gambitted. He also tends to vastly underestimate the Joker, and his ambitions come crashing down largely due to his billing himself as "Batman's true arch enemy" pissing off two far more dangerous operators - Mistah J himself, who believes only he can kill Batman, and Talia al Ghul, who wants him alive to rule at her side.
  • Basically applies to Doctor Randolph Porter, the doctor who created venom (the drug that gave Bane his superhuman strength). While Porter managed to manipulate Batman into becoming addicted to an early version of venom as part of his efforts to perfect the drug, even sacrificing his own daughter after using a variant of venom to boost his own intellect at the cost of limiting his ability to feel emotion, Porter falls into the trap of overestimating himself and underestimating his enemies. Not only does Batman overcome his addiction to Porter's drugs, but he then escapes a death trap that Porter believed could only be beaten if Batman took a new version of the drug, tricking Porter into giving him food, blankets and other tools that he can use to effect a more drawn-out escape plan. On top of that, Porter is tortured by a colonel he had been working with until Porter gives up the formula for the drug, the doctor having underestimated his own importance to the colonel’s plans. After Batman defeats the colonel and captures Porter, the doctor tries to use the pills he gave Batman to escape captivity after he’s arrested, but he ends up overdosing and dying of withdrawal in the prison hospital.
  • One of the main villains of James Tynion's run is Simon Saint, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who's working with Scarecrow in a scheme to take over Gotham and turn it into a Police State. Or at least, that's what he thinks the plan is; Saint is enough of an arrogant idiot to seriously think that Scarecrow is his lackey and they're in some kind of mutually beneficial partnership. In truth, Scarecrow is manipulating Saint every step of the way as an Unwitting Pawn to pull off yet another of his mass fear experiments, and when the moment comes where Saint expected Scarecrow to take a dive, the supervillain just keeps going while gleefully mocking Saint for thinking the two of them were anything approaching equals. In general, Saint is portrayed as basically being a dumb, spoiled yuppie who saw guys like Lex Luthor get away with supervillainy on the regular and got the idea in his head that he could do that.
• Birds of Prey:
  • Tabitha Brennan, the teenage daughter of a crime boss, sets up her father to be killed and tricks the Birds into protecting her from the killers. Tabby then calls a meeting of the key members of her father's organization to reveal she is now in charge and starts to outline her plans to take over Gotham...at which point, the veteran mobsters literally laugh at the idea they're going to let a teenage girl run a major crime organization. They're soon fighting among themselves, ignoring her constantly barking "orders" and thus, the entire organization comes apart thanks to the girl thinking herself a major power player, particularly when she tries to unleash a magical weapon on them to assert her authority without actually knowing how to control it.
  • Gail Simone's run on Birds of Prey and her Secret Six feature Katarina Armstrong, the Spy Smasher. Granddaughter of the legendary Fawcett Comics World War II hero of the same name, she inherited all his patriotism and espionage skill but none of his morals, and holds multiple advanced degrees and high positions in virtually every US government agency, clearly positioning her as a Goliath of an antagonist. As the stories proceed, however, it becomes apparent that her greatest talent by far is digging up incriminating details on people much more competent than she is and using that to control them, and if she's ever deprived of this leverage she folds like a wet paper bag. Her story concludes with her making the extremely unwise choice of attempting to unseat her biggest rival in the spy community, Amanda Waller of the Suicide Squad, by conducting an extremely elaborate plot to frame her for treason... only for her to inadvertently clue Waller in to her agenda with a single conversation, resulting in Waller doctoring Kat's documents so that when she released them, she'd actually be incriminating herself instead.
• Final Crisis:
  • Utterly obscure villain The Human Flame demands the death of major DC hero Martian Manhunter as his price for joining the Society, whose leaders wanted to use him to win other villains to his side. He ends up on the run from both heroes and villains, with characters noting that the Flame only lasted that long because nobody expected him to keep going when it would have been more sensible to give up and surrender.
  • Flame's benefactor Libra might also count. For the one who killed Martian Manhunter, he's reduced pretty much to an afterthought once his boss Darkseid enters the scenes.
• The Flash: The Daniel West iteration of Reverse-Flash has played this trope straight to tragic levels. Initially presented as a new Arch-Enemy for Barry in New 52, he was unceremoniously moved to New Suicide Squad after one story arc to make room for the reappearance of Professor Zoom after the latter gained a new level of recognition in the 2014 TV series — then Dropped a Bridge on Him mid-Heel Realisation there. Rebirth had Barry regain some of his pre-Flashpoint memories and start referring to Thawne as the first Reverse-Flash once more, displacing him completely from even sole use of the Reverse-Flash name. Meanwhile, Thawne constantly made snide remarks about Daniel's use of the name, not even acknowledging him as a successor like he did Hunter Zolomon, his true successor. On top of all this, Hunter Zolomon was also later revealed to be alive, thus further distancing Daniel from the top of the villain chain. Since he was only effective in one arc, he can't even claim to be a recurring villain, let alone a Big Bad Wannabe now.
• Green Arrow: The two-part story "Night Olympics" by Alan Moore features a street punk with some archery skills named Pete Lomax who believes that superheroes are frauds and ambushes Green Arrow and Black Canary to show how easily a "regular person" could kill them. Though he manages to injure Dinah, Oliver scares him off and, after checking on Dinah, proceeds to quickly track Lomax down. The resulting "fight" between the two sees Lomax being so hilariously outmatched by Green Arrow that he passes out.
• New Gods:
  • Desaad dreams of one day overthrowing Darkseid and taking his place, but is ultimately too cowardly and spineless to ever try.
  • Grayven's whole existence is defined by this trope. The youngest and least favorite of Darkseid's sons, he's a pale imitation of his father in every respect and his plans to take over Apokolips for himself always end in failure. It says something that Kalibak (himself a son of Darkseid that the ruler of Apocaylpse doesn't hold in entirely high regard) is considered to be more competent than him.
• The Sandman: The third rate villain Dr. Destiny gains godhood and that appears to be it. it's only temporary. Once unleashed Dream is a literal force of nature and beyond such combat. Another example are the minor nightmares Brute and Glob (originally from a much more child-friendly DC comic that previously held the Sandman title) manage to make their own miniature Dreaming from a single child's mind.
• Mist II from Starman, daughter of the original Mist, thinks that she's a brilliant supervillain and Manipulative Bastard who will rule Opal City. In reality, all she ends up doing is committing a bunch of terrible crimes that had zero benefits like drugging and raping Starman and killing one of the Crimson Foxes. This backfires on her pretty spectacularly; the original Mist, enraged by how she's ruined his title and reputation, berates her for what a shitty criminal she is and then proceeds to shoot her dead with stunning ease.
• Superman:
  • In Krypton No More, the Protector — a super-villain who has the ability to change his molecular structure at will — boasts about being invincible and actually thinks that he can defeat Superman and Supergirl. It's true he is powerful and hits hard, but he is nothing but a dumb, reckless, impulsive thug, and Superman defeats him as soon as he gets serious.
  • New Krypton
    • General Zod is this throughout the story arcs. Despite being made the leader of the last surviving Kryptonians with designs on annihilating the human race, Zod frequently finds himself outclassed by Brainiac and Luthor. Lex especially: By the story arcs' end, Zod is re-imprisoned in the Phantom Zone with New Krypton destroyed and the remaining Kryptonians killed. Meanwhile, Lex is hailed as a hero for stopping the Kryptonians and receives a full pardon for his past crimes.
    • Take away Luthor and General Sam Lane is left with no ability to enact his plans. Worse still, when it comes to open warfare he and his Human Defence Corps (Metallo aside) have no real ability to stand up to Zod's forces, putting Superman in the position of having to bail them out.
  • Last Daughter of Krypton: Simon Tycho is a corrupt, arrogant and amoral businessman with a small army of scientists and mercenaries on his payroll. It sounds like a good opponent for Supergirl, especially when he gets his hands on a shard of Kryptonite... except that he is not intelligent, ruthless or conniving enough to be a real threat. He underestimates his obviously Kryptonian enemy, and he almost dies when she blows her space station up after outsmarting him. Even so, he goes after her a while later, which gets him accidentally killed.
  • Invoked in Many Happy Returns by Kara Zor-El when she informs Rebel -a Flying Brick thug- that he is an insignificant idiot they had to deal with until a true menace turned up.
    Supergirl: Don't you get it, Rebel? You're not important! You never were! You were just — something to do! Something for [Linda] and me to bounce off of for a while until people and events of real consequence came along!
  • Lesla-Lar is a brilliant, ambitious, cunning and manipulative mad scientist who is a skillful manipulator but can never win a direct physical confrontation. In The Girl with the X-Ray Mind, Lesla-Lar tries to deceive Supergirl and manipulate the Phantom Zone criminals as part of her world-conquering plans, but she is easily and swiftly killed off by the Phantom Zoners as soon as they stop needing her.
• Wonder Woman Vol 2: Veronica Cale is a millionaire perfume magnate and Mad Scientist who fancies herself the Lex Luthor to Diana's Superman. The problem is that Cale lacks not only superpowers, but common sense, and regularly finds herself the pawn of more powerful antagonists, including Dr. Psycho, the Gorgons, and Circe. She becomes far more dangerous in Wonder Woman (Rebirth) where she is pushed into villainy by more powerful individuals trying to use her as a pawn.

Films

Films

• Black Mask in Batman: Under the Red Hood. He's actually pretty competent, but becomes the Unwitting Pawn in Red Hood's scheme to get hold of the Joker and try to force Batman to kill the Joker. Worse, when Black Mask frees the Joker (under duress), the Joker has Black Mask and Ms. Li Bound and Gagged!
• The Dark Knight Trilogy:
  • Carmine Falcone from Batman Begins. As Gotham City's major crime boss, he makes very clear to Bruce that he's completely untouchable; but once Bruce becomes Batman and starts to get serious against crime in Gotham, he stands no chance and he ends up becoming a guinea pig for the experiments of Dr. Crane, a guy he thought was his underling but who actually worked for the true Big Bad, Ra's al Ghul.
  • Salvatore 'Sal' Maroni the new Mafia Boss from The Dark Knight aspires to replace Falcone as the new master of Gotham, but he's no threat compared to the Joker.
  • John Daggett in The Dark Knight Rises pays Bane "a small fortune" for helping him attempt to take over Wayne Enterprises. Bane later points out that, contrary to what Daggett thinks, this doesn't give him any power over Bane before then swiftly killing Daggett now that he's at that point no longer of any use to Bane.
• Superman: Brainiac Attacks: Lex Luthor, for all his ambitions of world domination, is hopelessly outclassed by Brainiac. He makes a deal with Brainiac to help dispose of Superman, whereupon he will seemingly chase Brainiac out of Earth, making himself a hero in the eyes of the populace. Unsurprisingly, Brainiac ends up turning on him. It turns out Luthor anticipated that, which is why he planted a self-destruct sequence on him. What he didn't anticipate was Brainiac already knowing about, and subsequently removing, said self-destruct sequence, leaving Luthor to be quickly flattened.

Live-Action TV

Live-Action TV

• Arrowverse
  • General Wade Eiling in The Flash (2014). Normally he'd be a genuine threat and someone to be concerned about, but he's far less influential than he thinks and is ultimately irrelevant compared to the Reverse-Flash and Gorilla Grodd, the real Big Bads. In fact, this ends up being his downfall; after his attempts to make metahuman weapons interferes in the Reverse-Flash's schemes once too often, he gets fed up with it and has Grodd effortlessly Mind Rape Eiling.
  • On Legends of Tomorrow, a trip to 1717 reveals that under his boasting and supposedly evil persona, Blackbeard is a coward who doesn't hesitate to give up information under the slightest threat or bargain to save his own skin.
• Smallville: Alexander Luthor talks a good game, and his Enfante Terrible (later Teens Are Monsters) status, and undoubted Evil Genius make him a legitimate threat to the heroes. Yet he's too fundamentally screwed up to replace the genuine Lex Luthor, and his Clone Degeneration causes him to slowly break down both mentally and physically, ultimately resulting in total amnesia and a Heel–Face Turn. A similar case could be made for the Ax-Crazy Lex Clone who escaped in the Season 10 premiere: he's incredibly dangerous, but is too insane to fully step into Lex's shoes, and is in the middle of The Last Dance anyway. They've got the same problem in fact: they're very capable opponents but are overshadowed by both their genetic source material and the season's real Big Bad.
• Watchmen (2019): The Seventh Kavalry, and their leader Senator Keene, ultimately turn out to be this. Their white supremacist agenda, carried out by extremely violent means, makes them the most obvious threat in the series, especially once we learn that their true goal is to steal Doctor Manhattan's powers for themselves. However, in the final episode it's revealed that all along they were Unwitting Pawns of the true Big Bad, Lady Trieu, who allowed them to carry out the setup for that plan just to swoop in and hijack the endgame for her own ends.

Video Games

Video Games

• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • The Riddler is not exactly harmless by any means, but compared to the other villains he can't measure up. He keeps boasting to everyone how he's Batman's intellectual equal and match when at best he's been an annoyance who is too self-deluding to solve a mystery as basic as finding out Batman's Secret Identity (something Bane, Hugo Strange and Scarecrow for instance found out with Boring, but Practical means). He is also unable to come anywhere near the threat level of The Joker or Scarecrow whose plans are massive in scope and grand in vision in comparison to the Riddler's extremely narrow and petty goals.
  • Two-Face is this in Arkham City. He's certainly a threat in his own right (capturing and almost executing Catwoman at the start of the game, for example) and is one of three crime lords waging war for control of Arkham City, but he gets taken out rather easily by Batman early on and spends the rest of the game in hiding. In contrast, his rivals, Joker and the Penguin, both take considerably more effort to defeat and are much, much more dangerous than Harvey ever was. Sure, he pretty much won the gang war by game's end...but that's only because Batman had concentrated on taking out Joker's and Penguin's gangs first. Then in the epilogue, he tries to take revenge on Catwoman by blowing up her apartment and stealing her loot, taking half for himself and giving the rest to his gang. However, he fails to actually kill Selina who very quickly tracked him down and delivered another humiliating defeat to him, before recovering her fortune from his gang at her leisure. It doesn't get any better for Harv in Arkham Knight where he only features in a side mission which ends with Batman taking on Two-Face and his goons in a Predator encounter... where Two-Face is no tougher than a regular mook and can be easily defeated with a simple Stealth Takedown.
  • The Penguin is a ruthless, sadistic monster with an army of loyal, brutal thugs at his disposal, but compared to the likes of the Joker, Hugo Strange, and Scarecrow, he just can't compete. Not to mention that he's nowhere near as cunning as he likes to fancy himself. In Arkham City, while he puts up more of a fight than Two-Face, he still gets taken out long before the end of the game. In Knight, he's relegated to a side mission which sees Batman and Nightwing systematically destroy all of Penguin's money and weapon caches, leaving with him with nothing.
• Gotham Knights (2022): Once their mystique is stripped away, it becomes clear that The Court of Owls are just a bargain-brand version of the League of Shadows, with far less reach, far less power, and far less ideological rigour. They even have a weaker and more poorly-understood version of the League's Lazarus Pits in their 'Dionesium', which they use to make their zombie-like Talon enforcers. This ends up being a major plot point, as the League itself holds them in disgust and contempt once it finds out about them and enters a furious internal debate over whether to destroy or absorb them.
  • Played with. As a high-level member of the Court, Jacob Kane has enough power and influence to make Carmine Falcone look like a low-rent hoodlum. But Talia easily kills him and becomes the True Final Boss.

Western Animation

Western Animation

• Batman Beyond
  • The Jokerz are a street gang who emulate the Clown Prince of Crime, but they are a far cry from the original villain, as Bruce Wayne is quick to point out. Their inspiration also mentions this in the movie. He calls them "a disgrace to the name Joker" and spends the rest of the scene scaring the crap out of them.
  • Derek Powers A.K.A Blight is a nasty piece of work, for sure, but he's nowhere near the Machiavellian mastermind he believes himself to be. His threat comes more from the nature of his powers and his position of authority than his scheming as his plans are consistently thwarted by Batman and his condition deteriorates his mind to the point he's tricked into exposing himself as Blight to the public by his own son. Once his son outs him as Blight, it's basically over for Powers and he's (apparently) killed off not long after. Without his powers, he'd be just another run-of-the-mill Corrupt Corporate Executive, and with his powers he's as much a threat to himself as anyone else.
  • Paxton Powers was able to out his father Derek Powers as supervillain Blight and took over his father's position as CEO of Wayne-Powers Enterprises. Unfortunately for Paxton, he isn't as effective as his father when it comes to villainy. Prior to King's Ransom, he was mostly known for private parties. When he does decide to involve himself more in criminal affairs in that episode by hiring the Royal Flush Gang, his refusal to honor his deal due to damages to the stolen goods gets him kidnapped by them. He offers to pay King millions by assassinating Bruce Wayne, but that falls apart fast, and he's arrested at the end of the episode, destroying his family's control over Bruce's company.
• Harley Quinn (2019): After breaking up with the Joker, Harley Quinn seeks to replace him as the top villain in Gotham City. However, her attempts only make her seen as a regular criminal at best. When she tries to attract a big-league superhero like Superman or Batman, or try to join the Legion of Doom, it never works out as she hopes, being seen as a nuisance at best or a pest at worst.
• My Adventures with Superman: Dr. Anthony Ivo/Parasite remains the second-most-active antagonist after Task Force X, eventually betrays the group once they've given him everything he needs, and becomes a massive Kaiju who threatens the entirety of Metropolis. But despite talking a big game, he's quickly defeated once Metropolis stops supplying him with power, and Superman takes him down in only the penultimate episode of Season 1, whereas the comparatively less-dangerous Task Force X sticks around to menace Superman in the finale.
• Static Shock: Ebon styles himself a "collector" of meta-humans, gathering disenfranchised but powered-youths under his banner; it's clear he'd like to think of himself as a Magneto-esque super villain, but in reality, Ebon is little more than a petty gangster manipulating and pressuring scared and lonely kids, and his "Meta-Breed" is ultimately just another street gang. This is best evidenced by the fact that most of the time we see them, Ebon and his cronies are squatting in abandoned subway tunnels and warehouses, and subsisting on junk food.
• Teen Titans (2003)
  • Killer Moth is a Mad Scientist with dreams of conquering the city, and the skill to probably make it happen if he didn't have a ridiculous gimmick, and wasn't completely cowed by his Bratty Teenage Daughter. She's as evil as he is, but not very bright, and when she hijacks his scheme as a means to get a date for her prom, things go downhill pretty fast. His second appearance, without his daughter to make demands, he came a lot closer to defeating the Titans.
  • Control Freak thinks himself the Titans' nemesis, but would later discover they don't consider him much of a villain. Their list to Titans East on their biggest villains mentioned Puppet King, a one-shot villain, but not him.

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