Metallo Superman Man of Steel

Warner Bros.

"Man of Steel" had a terrific opening weekend, but since it's never too early to put the cart before Comet the Super-Horse, director Zack Snyder and producer Christopher Nolan were already hard at work on a sequel even before the film opened. Which begs one major question: Who should be the villain?

After all, if there's any genre in movies that truly lives or dies on the strength of the villain, its superhero films. The good ones all have great villains (the Joker in "The Dark Knight, " "The Avengers" foe Loki, Magneto from "X2") while the bad ones. .. don't (sorry, Venom in "Spider-Man 3" and cloud form Galactus in "4: Rise of the Silver Surfer").

So with that in mind, we've scoured our comic book archive to determine which villain would be the best match for Superman in "Man of Steel 2." Because a hero is only as good as his enemy is bad — and when you've got the world's greatest hero, you need to have a villain that's very, very bad indeed.

Over the past three decades, Warner Bros. has tired again and again to use Brainiac as the bad guy in a Superman movie. And every time, the movie that would've featured Brainiac ended up getting scrapped before it saw the light of day. Now, though, his time may finally have come. As a super-advanced sentient robot bent on dominating or destroying humanity, Brainiac has every bit of Lex Luthor's genius with the added benefit of being a physical threat to Superman as well.

He may not be the most obvious choice, but there's just about no villain we'd rather see Superman face off against than Black Adam. When he intones the magic word "Shazam!, " Black Adam becomes the world's mightiest mortal, infused with mystical powers that make him more than a match for Superman, who counts magic as his only weakness other than Kryptonite. Black Adam also happens to have a complex moral code, which would make him an intriguing foe, not to mention that fact that it could allow "Man of Steel 2" to be a backdoor pilot for a possible Captain Marvel movie. That's a win-win.