Recently, we ran an article imagining a purely hypothetical situation in which Batman would have a particularly hard time facing off against five Marvel villains of our choosing, including Doctor Doom and Eternity. It was a particularly hard time, admittedly, to come up with a total of five villains that would actually have a chance at victory against the Dark Knight.
On the other side of that coin, I could have picked out hundreds out of the nearly thousands of evildoers that exist in the Marvel universe that Batman would effortlessly ruin - physically, mentally, or both. However, I decided to stick with just five in this life, for consistency.
So, in case you needed refresher on the incomparably vast range of capabilities possessed by Bruce Wayne’s alter ego, I figured we would use the following baddies from the Caped Crusader’s rival universe. These are just a handful of the many Marvel villains that would just be asking for trouble by challenging Batman.
Green Goblin
After a chemical accident gives wealthy industrialist Norman Osborn (father to Peter Parker’s best friend, Harry) a split personality, his evil half takes on the appearance of a creature of folklore, terrorizing Manhattan from above with his state of the art hover glider and homemade bombs. Fighting a cosplaying terrorist like the Green Goblin is a nightmare when you are a web-slinging high school student. For Batman, it would be a walk in the park.
Surveillance is practically a hobby to the world’s greatest detective and, with his clear-minded observational skills, Batman would easily be able to piece together that Green Goblin’s true identity must be someone who managed to steal from Oscorp, or someone works for the company, or even the man who owns it. In addition to his deductive reasoning, Bruce Wayne has been a tech wizard since his youth and more than likely has a log of the kind of technology used to develop the glider, which is the right kind of knowledge he would need to use against Goblin by disarming the glider from the comfort of his Batwing before swooping down for rooftop quarrel that would put the dishonorable Norman Osborn in the medical bay of the local prison.
Sandman
Speaking of people who give Peter Parker a hard time, poverty-stricken master thief William Baker suffered an accidental exposure to radiation and sand that gave him the ability to control every particle in his body as if it were a small, coarse mineral grain. After taking on the supervillain alias Sandman, not to be confused with Neil Gaiman’s DC Vertigo property, Baker would flop back and forth from Avengers ally to Sinister Six member, making him a puzzling character when it comes to trust. Batman, however, would not waste a second of hesitation on him.
It does not require genius level-intellect, like Bruce Wayne has, to understand the science of sand (something anyone who has ever been near a beach can figure out), which Sandman is not invulnerable to. A blast of water from a hose connected to a Gotham City fire hydrant would be enough to weigh him down, but to really stop him in his tracks, all he needs to do is lure him into heating chamber, turn the fire up, and watch his body turn to glass. With all due respect to Spider-Man, maybe he and Batman should exchange numbers.
Ultron
Who could forget the time Tony Stark and Bruce Banner (or Hank Pym, if you’d rather follow Marvel Comics canon) tried to create an artificial intelligence that would better mankind, only to see it become its greatest threat? To a technophobic like me, Ultron sounds like the name I would have no choice but to call my overlord, especially if it takes Stark creating an additional tech-based being later called Vision in order to stop it. However, for Bruce Wayne, a mechanical enemy is a best case scenario.
Not only could Batman singlehandedly take on an army of robotic Ultron avatars in hand-to-hand combat, but even if he were to resort to that method of defeat, it would be no more than an opportunity for practice. By then, he would have already broken through Ultron’s firewall, doctored up a virus capable of scrambling his memory to digital mush, and giving humanity the edge over our robot overlords again. You can always count on someone with the perfect balance of deep emotional issues and technical brilliance like Bruce Wayne to effectively rage against the machine.
Stream Avengers: Age of Ultron here.
Kingpin
Organized crime has become a rarity in Gotham City with the sight of the Bat-signal’s beam striking fear into the hearts of most known mobsters. However, mob activity is a level above Gotham in Marvel’s iteration of New York, with Wilson Fisk (a man whose genius is outweighed by his nearly superhuman levels of strength) being the primary author of the city’s most sinister crimes and the bane of several Marvel heroes' existence, often Daredevil or Spider-Man. Would the man known to the criminal world as Kingpin prove too much for Batman?
Kingpin may be a criminal mastermind, but no hero knows who to think like a villain better than Batman, and an agile warrior skilled in multiple forms of martial arts and peak-human strength like the Caped Crusader can sweep the floor with a sumo wrestler like Wilson Fisk. Fisk is capable of things that any other mere mortal vigilantes would cower in fear from, but there is nothing mere about the otherwise mortal Batman, whose knack for always staying one step ahead of his enemies, with his fists and with his mind, would cause the mighty Kingpin to suffer an epic strike out.
Thanos
Thirty or so Avengers were unable to prevent the big, purple Titan from turning half of the universe into dust before having to make things right by way of time travel, all of which took place over the course of two movies with combined runtime of nearly six hours. If Batman were involved, taking down Thanos would have been a much quicker process.
Hear me out: being the world's greatest detective, locating and retrieving the remaining Infinity Stones before Thanos can get ahold of them by way of deductive reasoning, interrogation, and clever bargaining with Red Skull at Vormir (he is also a very persuasive talker) would be a relative breeze. Of course, when you cross Thanos, there is sure to be hell to pay, to which Batman would have the perfect response: the Hellbat, a suit of armor developed by the Justice League specifically for combat against superhuman threats, which has come in handy against big bads like Darkseid and Eradicator. With the help of that suit, Bats could defeat the Mad Titan in a round or two, with no lives resorted to dust, time travel made unnecessary, and the world resting easily knowing that the most powerful device in the universe is safe in Batman’s possession.
For those who still, after reading these explanations, cannot seem to fathom the idea of a human singlehandedly being able defeat the Marvel Universe’s most threatening villains, all you need to understand is one simple fact: because he’s Batman. You can always find more reason to put your faith in the Dark Knight and additional information on Marvel villains he would lay waste to here on CinemaBlend.
