1. The Sinestro Corps WarÂ
Truth be told, while researching this list I was shocked that The Sinestro Corps War animated movie hadn’t been made yet. For those unaware, The Sinestro Corps War was an 11-issue event that was essentially The Empire Strikes Back of Green Lantern stories, with the entirety of the Green Lantern Corps fighting against the fear-powered yellow legion known as the Sinestro Corps. The Green Lanterns, a long running series with multiple spinoff titles, feature a roster of malachite warriors drafted out of the woodwork and obscure Silver Age comics to join the war effort. I’m talking everyone, from the non-Daily Show John Stewart and fan favorite Hal Jordan to a talking flying squirrel, granted lethal force to kill flying avatars of fear across a glittering cosmos.
But what if you don’t really care about the Green Lantern Corps? Well then you’re just like me when I originally picked up the title, as the Sinestro Corps’ ranks are where the truly interesting characters lurk. Since the yellow Corps of fear is relatively new, pink headed commander Sinestro had to do some recruiting across the DC Universe, adding not only a cyborg Superman and the pike-toothed dragon-bug fear-alien Parallax to his Corps, but also an alternate universe Superman-Prime (imagine a teenage emo Superman and you get the gist), Batman rogue The Scarecrow and, yeah, even The Batman himself for about five seconds. The beauty of The Sinestro Corps War lies is in the fact that there are just so many characters to cover and endless possibilities for how the fights ultimately turn out that you get these beautiful splash pages of brightly-colored kill zones against a stunning galaxy backdrop. Look hard enough in these skirmishes and you’ll even notice cameos from other significant pop culture aliens, including E.T., Predator, and an Alien (which incidentally is called a Xenomorph) from Alien!
The only thing better than these large war-splashes would be an animated war-splash. A great sense of speed and urgency is implied throughout the work, and while I love green and yellow tracer tails as much as the next nerd, The Sinestro Corps War can honestly only look better when taken off the page. Even characters that would require their own movie to truly encapsulate the gravitas of their presence (unless you were around comic book stores in the late eighties, the term Anti-Monitor likely means nothing to you, but he’s here too and it’s super significant and ominous, as he’s essentially the intergalactic Hitler of the DC Universe), could easily be substituted for other characters, as The Sinestro Corps War serves as a grab-bag of the best heroes and villains the DC Universe has to offer. You could focus on just the living planet Mogo who just slowly orbits around, as planets do, and it would still be an epic of the grandest scale.
To recap: Empire Strikes Back, but everybody has a light-saber and can fly, with Cyborg Superman fighting alongside the biggest comic book villain from the eighties, and the goddamn Batman with a power ring why doesn’t this movie exist yet?
But as I said about four web-pages ago, these five stories are just the tip of the DC universe iceberg, and there are countless long boxes worth of tales likely worthy of their own animated original movies —so which ones would you choose?
Am I insane for not placing The Killing Joke at #1? Am I insane for listing The Killing Joke in the first place? Would the zombie-killing antics of Blackest Night serve as a better film? Should I have just stuck to my initial draft and listed only Batman stories? Let us know in the comments!
