DCEU: All 16 DC Extended Universe films ranked from worst to best (including Aquaman 2)

16. Justice League

It’s a sad state of affairs when your shared universe’s “endgame” is your darkest hour, but unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened in the case of Justice League.

The DCEU’s answer to the MCU’s 2012 offering The Avengers, the film brought an end to the very first chapter of the shared universe and officially united the world’s most iconic line-up of superheroes. Unfortunately, narrative issues and a lack of overall planning prevented it from being the large-scale superhero showdown we all wanted it to be.

While the likes of Wonder Woman and Suicide Squad elicited strong reactions from audiences (though for different reasons), Justice League‘s biggest issue is that it landed somewhere in the middle of the road. It wasn’t overwhelmingly good, nor was it incredibly awful. It just, well, existed… languishing somewhere between the good and the bad with nothing to say.

That may have been down to the fact that the DCEU was in the height of its identity crisis and hadn’t quite figured out what it wanted to be. Thus, what started off as a grim and brooding world had evolved into tonally ambiguous environment that was still visually all of that and yet tried to lighten the mood with jokes… from Batman of all people. It just didn’t work and that, alongside the incredibly on-the-nose script, reduced the DCEU’s primary objective to rubble in two hours.