As the grim news from the City piles ever higher, it would be nice to have some kind of superhero on hand to could fix everything for us so we could get on with planning for Christmas.

But that's not going to happen. Not even in the increasingly sombre superhero movie universe of films such as The Dark Knight where Batman faces impossible dilemmas that he knows will end in at least one tragedy. Until now that is. In this uplifting clip from College Humor, the brooding vigilante of Gotham City gets a little help from his Metropolis counterpart, Superman. It's a chucklesome three minutes that flags up the key reason that the much-anticipated Superman/Batman movie has never been made. The boy from Krypton would ruin it.

Probably the third best-known hero from the DC comics pantheon is The Flash. He has yet to make it to the big screen, but in this extraordinary piece of wishful thinking from a creative fan we can see the bootleg video of a sneak preview trailer for a film that hasn't even been planned. Fake trailers are all over YouTube these days, but to screen your clip in a real cinema and record the result on a mobile phone represents either the apotheosis of internet hoaxing or the most cunning piece of focus group marketing ever.

Proving that not all superhero team-ups are doomed to be unequal contests, Marvel have chosen to prefigure the 2010 Avengers movie, in which their premier super-team is expected to slug it out with their premier short-tempered giant radioactive scientist The Hulk, by pitting the jolly green giant against Thor, the most powerful Avenger, in a direct-to-DVD animated slugfest . Watch the trailer here .

After all, we need something to sustain us until March 2009, when the next big superhero movie comes out. That of course is Watchmen, where the super-powered Dr Manhattan takes all the fun out of it for assorted Batman types who just want to beat up criminals. See the latest trailer here .

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010