Watch All The Fake Deaths In DC Movies

There are few more time-honored tropes in action and adventure movies than the fake [...]

There are few more time-honored tropes in action and adventure movies than the fake death.

Typically a moment when the hero, the love interest, or someone else the audience is emotionally invested in "dies" onscreen, only to return -- usually moments later -- leaving nothing behind but the adrenaline rush that kicked up when you thought they really might have "gone there."

Moments like this can happen in any movie, of course -- and they do -- but big-budget blockbusters are especially prone to them since the stakes tend to be life-and-death from the word go.

This goes double for superhero franchises, where the characters have powers far beyond those of mortal man -- meaning that they have ways to come back from the dead, should the story demand it. They are also mostly franchises that require periodic upkeep so, no matter how "real" it seems, the odds of Superman or Batman staying dead for long are...not high.

Enter YouTuber Dimitri Bitu, who has taken the time to put together a supercut of all the times these things have happened in a DC Comics adaptation — big-budget movies, only — beginning with 1978's Superman: The Movie and ending with Suicide Squad (although there was a big in here lifted from Justice League, wherein the death itself came from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice).

Some of these, of course, barely count: when you look in particular at the deaths of The Joker and Catwoman in Tim Burton's Batman movies, those moments were clearly setting up the origin stories of the characters and it does not seem like anyone was expected to believe they were actually lost for the rest of the movie.

Others, of course, are more apt: Suicide Squad's fake-death of The Joker, for instance, was clearly a moment meant to have real emotional heft until it was undone about 15 minutes later. Same with Superman: The Movie killing off Lois Lane and then reviving her with a heretofore-unmentioned super power.

You can see some fake deaths, and some real ones, in Justice League, available digitally now. DC's next movie, Aquaman, will be in theaters on December 21.

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