I finally got around to watching Deadpool this past week, and I loved it. It was everything I like about Marvel Superhero movies; funny, action-packed, and the proper balance between light and heavy subject matter. Most importantly however, it focused on the strength of Marvel Pictures: Superheroes.

Marvel, even in comic book form, has excelled at weaving heroes and narrative together. Unlike DC, Marvel understood that heroes function best in a team setting, where their individual successes and flaws can be overcome through teamwork. Of all the Marvel heroes, only Spider-Man and Daredevil managed to build their brand through solo endeavors (and even they have been a part of The Avengers and Fantastic Four).

Where Marvel struggles is in the creation of super villains, particularly on screen where perhaps the two most well known in Dr. Doom and Magneto are still owned by Warner Bros, making their licensing difficult for Disney. Even before the Marvel Universe was incorporated into the Disney Universe, Marvel franchises were driven by their heroes and tanked by their villains. Spider Man 3, Daredevil (the Ben Affleck version) and Fantastic Four 2 were all movies that tanked due to either diluting the plot with too many villains (SP3 and FF2) or focusing on a villain so much that the audience loses interest in the film.

Even the Netflix and TV Marvel shows are driven by the heroes with largely replaceable villains. Daredevil is a slight exception, since Fisk (Kingpin) is a pretty decent villain, particularly by Marvel standards, but Agents of SHIELD and Jessica Jones are completely hero driven. SHIELD spends three full seasons with interesting and complex heroes and confusing, shadowy, and largely irrelevant villains. Half the time no one even knows who the villains are. THEY DON’T EVEN RESOLVE THE HYDRA PLOT IN THE SHOW, letting Avengers 2 wipe out HYDRA for them. Jessica Jones, on the other hand, has a really interesting villain, but spends the whole show focusing on Jones and Cage (which is great because they are excellent characters). [an aside, Daredevil has the best villain ensemble in perhaps all of Marvel, featuring Kingpin, Bullseye, The Hand, etc. so kudos to Marvel for doing that justice.]

The movies are even more committed to the heroes at the expense of the villains. I have watched all three Iron Mans (Iron Men?) multiple times, and I have no idea who is the villain in any of them. It could be the government, or maybe lightning whip man, or maybe war machine? No one knows. The beauty of the series is that no one has to know, because watching Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man for two hours is really all anyone is paying for.

It is the same with the Avengers. Yes, Loki is cool, but he is pretty irrelevant, seeing as the movie climax involves an alien race we haven’t met before and is completely unrelated to Loki. That movie only works because the heroes are interesting, fun, and good enough at punching space fish that I forgot that Loki was in the movie. And Ultron… Ultron? Ultron is so b-tier that in Secret Wars he dies three times. THREE DEATHS IN ONE FEATURE. He barely matters for that movie, and was chosen as the bad guy only to show that Vision is a good cyborg so not all cyborgs are bad.

Avengers as a franchise suffers from a distinct lack of good villains. There most effective villain, Namor, was part of their team at one point. Plus, his power set of “water makes me strong” could have some drawbacks on screen. The rest of them suffer from being either distinctly another groups key villain (Dr. Doom, Magneto, Red Skull, Mole Man, Skrull, Vulture, Galactus etc.) or are so goofy and nonsensical that putting them on screen would seem trite (Mole Man, Skrull, Vulture, Galactus etc.). What Marvel has done, which is smart, is make the heroes so fun and interesting that their villains are largely interchangeable.

That is what makes Marvel movies like Deadpool and Civil War so exciting. They are playing to their strengths. Deadpool has “Captain Replaceable” and “Ms. Mundane” (read: Ajax and … strong lady?) as the villains. That movie so blatantly ignored the villains as characters that I actually do not know the name of the strong lady who punches Colossus in the groin and I just saw the movie. Rather, they chose to focus on Ryan Reynolds one liners, Deadpool slapstick, and Easter eggs for comic book nerds. I don’t know if the plot to Civil War the movie will be different from Civil War the comic book, but it is still right in Marvel’s wheelhouse, a movie where the heroes are center stage and everything else is exchangeable parts.

DC, meanwhile, does villains so well that their Heroes suffer for it. As a result, the only DC heroes that have managed successful movie franchises are the ones with villains that work on screen. Batman and Superman, while being the oldest of the DC Caped Crusaders, are also host to the best, and most diverse villains. There is one explanation for this. The extended DC universe, particularly when compared to Marvel, is a joke. DC has had very very writers for almost 100 years. What they have not had is a controlling genius CEO bent on intertwining every comic with every other comic until you can’t read one thing without wanting to read six other things; Marvel’s Stan Lee.

Theoretically great DC heroes like Shazam! The Martian, Wonder Woman, The Hawk, Aquaman, Mr. Plastic and so on have all failed to see modern success because they lack tangible, well known villains to grapple with (Mr. Plastic would be such an incredible movie). Flash and Green Arrow both managed to snag TV shoes yet seem to be less successful than their marvel counterparts purely due to their lack of intriguing villains. Blockbuster flops Catwoman and Green Lantern failed because they REALLY don’t have a tangible villain. Green Lantern’s nemesis is the color yellow. Try watching a super hero movie about that.

Partly due to Frank Miller and Chris Nolan, DC villains are clearly the peak of the genre. I’m not sure if I know any Batman lines from any of the Dark Knights, but I know a ton of Bane’s and Joker’s, and even a few of Ra Za Ghul’s. Dark Knight Rises has three heroes in it in Batman, Catwoman, and maybe Robin, and I couldn’t tell you a single thing that they did for that whole movie other than get beaten up by Bane.

That’s what bothers me so much about the new Batman versus Superman movie. DC is playing to its weakness, creating a movie where we either have to pay the most attention to the heroes, or else dislike the movie. And, not surprisingly, very few people seem to like the movie. There are a lot of complaints, poor plot, poor lighting, poor directing (sorry Snyder) poor direction, etc. but I don’t blame the movie.

I blame DC. They have to know that they can’t create an interesting movie or even comic based around Heroes. The good news for DC is that the next movie they have on the docket, Suicide Squad, plays right to that strength. It is, or it should be, a movie devoid of heroes; one containing only the bad guys of the DC universe. A movie committed to the DC wheelhouse. Also it was directed by David Ayers who did Training Day and The Fast and the Furious so that probably helps.

If you are a DC fan, and you are tired of having lost the comic book movie war of the 21st century, Suicide Squad has to be a shining light; a beacon of hope in the otherwise dreary DC movie universe.