Published
The question came from a 2016 edition of Showdown Sunday, published a fortnight after Suicide Squad opened, when Gotham seemed to own villainy on screen outright. Ten years on, the answer is less lopsided than it looked, because the Spider-Man rogues gallery went on to do something on film that Batman’s never has.
The case for Batman
Depth, first. Batman’s enemies were accumulated across eighty-plus years of monthly comics, and the result is a bench with no real equivalent: Joker, Two-Face, Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman, Bane, Scarecrow, Ra’s al Ghul, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, Killer Croc, Clayface, the Court of Owls. A Batman film can burn two A-tier villains at once (Nolan’s trilogy used six across three films) and leave the shelf looking full.
The screen record backs the depth argument. Jack Nicholson’s Joker carried the 1989 film’s marketing over its own hero. Heath Ledger won a posthumous Academy Award for The Dark Knight. Joaquin Phoenix won Best Actor for Joker, a film that grossed over a billion dollars while containing barely a minute of Batman. Two acting Oscars for one villain, in two unrelated continuities, is a record no other comic character of any kind can touch.
The case for Spider-Man
The Spider-Man rogues gallery is smaller (the working core is Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Venom, Sandman, Vulture, Mysterio, Kraven, the Lizard, Electro and Rhino), but it is built on a sharper idea. Batman’s villains are mostly strangers who fit his theme. Spider-Man’s are mostly people from Peter Parker’s own life: his mentor, his best friend’s father, his teacher, his rival, his hero. When they fall, it costs him something personal, which is why the material keeps producing tragedy rather than spectacle.
The films eventually noticed. Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin (2002) and Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus (2004) set a standard early, and both were brought back seventeen-plus years later for Spider-Man: No Way Home, not recast, resurrected, on the argument that those performances were canon worth keeping. Michael Keaton’s Vulture in Homecoming gave the series its best ordinary-guy antagonist, and Venom carried three films of his own between 2018 and 2024 without Spider-Man appearing in any of them. A rogues gallery that can headline its own trilogy is doing something Batman’s has only managed with the Joker.
What the films got wrong on both sides
Neither gallery survived its worst outings. Batman & Robin (1997) spent Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy on a toy commercial. Spider-Man 3 buried Sandman and Venom in one overcrowded script, a studio-mandated pile-up Sam Raimi later disowned, and the same pressure broke the franchise entirely: Spider-Man 4 was cancelled in January 2010 because Raimi wanted the Vulture and could not get a script he believed in past a fixed release date. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 repeated the overstuffing with Electro, the Green Goblin and Rhino, and lost the series its continuity a second time. Sony’s announced Sinister Six film (Drew Goddard writing and directing) never got made at all, which puts it in the same never-commissioned column this site’s sequel tracker exists to record.
The pattern is the same mistake from opposite directions: Gotham’s failures came from treating villains as disposable, Spider-Man’s from refusing to leave any of them out.
The verdict, revisited
On depth, Batman, and it is not close: no other hero can lose the Joker to another franchise’s Oscar campaign and still field Bane, the Riddler and Ra’s al Ghul without blinking. On design, Spider-Man: a rogues gallery wired into the hero’s own biography is a better story engine than a parade of themed strangers, and No Way Home proved the audience felt it: the film rested a two-billion-dollar gross on the assumption that viewers grieved for Doc Ock and the Goblin as people, not as bosses to beat.
The 2016 post called it for Batman. The fairer verdict now is a split decision: Batman has the better collection, Spider-Man has the better idea. The format this page belongs to settled harder questions — Tarantino against Nolan was the fifteenth edition, and the versus board carries the tradition on. One of the names above has a fuller file here: Willem Dafoe’s complete credits run to 138 films, of which the Goblin is somehow only the second strangest.