This list was first published in 2014, and has been updated periodically to reflect new superhero movie releases.
In 1998, predicting a fiscally and artistically rich superhero-movie industry would’ve gotten you laughed out of your local comics shop. Hell, the idea of an “industry” for movies about costumed heroes was ludicrous. No such thing had ever existed. Superhero movies had been few and far between throughout cinema history, and the then-most-recent superpowered flick had been 1997’s Batman and Robin — a movie so derided that George Clooney has spent 20 years apologizing for it. Then Wesley Snipes came along and changed everything. On August 21, 1998, Blade was released and audiences watched Snipes don the shades of the titular vampire-stabbing superhero (a longtime Marvel Comics staple). The picture earned more than $131 million worldwide. Quietly, a revolution began.
In the nearly two decades since, successful caped-crusader movies started trickling, then flooding, into theaters. Now we live in a world where the global film economy is largely built on them. The so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe alone has raked in more than $10 billion to date, and when a movie like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justicemakes $872 million, it’s regarded as something of a disappointment. Studios announce their superhero slates like Stalin announced five-year plans. High-profile directors get attached to adaptations of comics few have ever heard of. It sure feels like we’re in a bubble, but there’s no sign it’ll pop anytime soon — and even when it does pop, there will be plenty of products of this spandex-clad era worth rewatching. Here are the 30 best superhero movies since Blade kicked off their modern renaissance.
But first, a note about two absences of recent vintage: Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2. Infinity War is not on the list because, in this writer’s opinion, it offers no interesting new ideas, regurgitates the “serious moment interrupted by half-baked quip” formula ad nauseam, and mistakes surprise for gravity, and its ending is robbed of serious weight because it’s so obviously going to be reversed in its sequel (a trope borrowed from comics, yes, but easily one of comics’ most objectionable motifs). Similarly, though it has its perverse charms, Deadpool 2 is mostly a collection of gags strung together by a predictable plot. Despite its attempts at satirizing the superhero genre, it relies on hoary and well-worn tropes and thinks irreverence is the same thing as boldness. It feels like neither film will be much remembered in 20 years.
With that out of the way, let’s talk the methodology of this list. Our criteria for what constitutes a superhero movie are as follows: It must (a) be about a do-gooder or group of do-gooders who have super-human abilities or are more skilled at crime-fighting than any human possibly could be (Batman and the Punisher being examples of the latter); (b) be set primarily on Earth, which excludes sci-fi fantasias like Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy, as both are set in galaxies where superhuman abilities are commonplace; and (c) have been released theatrically. There’s also a certain amount of Potter Stewart–esque logic here: You know a superhero when you see one.
There’s a lot about the final chapter of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy that doesn’t quite work. To name a few problems: Bane and Catwoman have barely intelligible motivations, Batman ends the movie by flat-out retiring, and the plot’s politics are so cartoonishly reactionary that even the most die-hard Republican might say they’re a bit much. But boy, oh boy, is it pretty. This is one of the most visually sumptuous tentpole movies of recent years, with one breathtaking sight after another. The eerily quiet overhead shots of Gotham’s bridges exploding, the disappearing football field, and the stunning airplane-hijacking sequence are just a smattering of the highlights. And people really undervalue Tom Hardy’s line readings. Sure, the audio distortion is overdone, but he created a unique bad-guy voice in the cinematic canon, which is nothing to sneeze (or wheeze) at. If you haven’t entertained yourself by saying “Perhaps he’s wondering why someone would shoot a man … before throwing him out of a plane!” in a Bane voice to yourself while alone, you’re really missing out.
Despite being an American, Judge Dredd (and, yes, that is his real last name) is only a big star in the United Kingdom. The scowling enforcer of postapocalyptic justice is one of the most famous characters to ever emerge from British comics, but he’s sadly never caught on here. This slimly budgeted film adaptation didn’t change that fact — it landed with a thud at the box office and has barely even become a cult classic. That’s a damn shame, as Dredd is a compact delight. In less than 90 minutes, it gives us deliciously violent action, a hypnotic electronic score, and just-this-side-of-over-the-top performances from Karl Urban and Lena Headey. Plus, the whole thing’s about as decadent an ode to slo-mo as any movie ever released.
At its core, this is a movie about how one person’s death can suck the air out of a family and a community. Given how little regard the average superhero movie has for mortality (what with all the building-smashing and world-exploding), Big Hero 6’s confrontation with grief is remarkable. Sure, it’s a thrill to watch the high-flying action sequences in the movie’s surreal mash-up of Tokyo and San Francisco, and anyone with a heart will enjoy the inflatable “health-care companion” robot Baymax. But what really sticks with you is Baymax’s clinical, repeated line of questioning to boy-genius protagonist Hiro: If we beat the bad guy, will that improve your mental health? It’s a simple twist on the old “If I kill the villain, I’ll be just as bad as he is” routine, but a twist that has considerable emotional weight.
27. X-Men (2000)
In retrospect, it’s astounding how good the casting in X-Men was. At the time, superhero movies were still mostly a dead letter in Hollywood, and the marquee names of the day wouldn’t touch a movie like this. So Bryan Singer took the Moneyball approach: Almost everyone he snagged was either undervalued in the market (Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen), underestimated as a pretty face (James Marsden and Rebecca Romijn), or a near-complete unknown (Hugh Jackman). Sure, there are duds in the lineup (Tyler Mane’s and Ray Park’s presences here are best left alongside the Y2K virus as turn-of-the-millennium curiosities), but the synergy of this cast of misfits still provides a frisson of delight. It’s not a great film, but it was solid enough and exciting enough to rescue the superhero genre from obscurity. Although Blade came first, it was X-Men that really made the rest of this list possible.
There’s this myth that all Batman stories have to be dark. These days, you hardly ever see a tale about Batsy in print or film that doesn’t feature heavy doses of angst and meditations on the brutality of daily life. But the fact is that the character can be quite fun and goofy and often has been, such as in the Batman TV show from the late 1960s and his comics adventures from the late ’40s to the early ’70s. Usually, Batman movies pretend that stuff never happened, but The Lego Batman Movie is a blissful exception. It takes the fundamentally ludicrous core of the character — angsty man-child who dresses like a rodent — and embraces them, along with various silly elements of his past incarnations. And yet, somehow, it also produces its own kind of pathos in the form of Will Arnett’s Batman’s repressed longing for a family. The voice cast is jam-packed with great performances from top-flight personalities like Zach Galifianakis and Rosario Dawson, and the Lego-fied visual gags never get old. Anyone who turns their nose up at this flick should ask themselves whether they’re truly a Batman fan.
Superhero stories have long been derided as power fantasies for emotionally stunted adolescent boys. Josh Trank and Max Landis’s terrifying Chronicle takes that criticism and turns it on its ear, asking what would happen if emotionally stunted adolescent boys actually got to live out such power fantasies. It’s unsparing in its answer: They’d raze the world. The movie, in its first two-thirds, is chilling not only because of its deft use of found-footage-horror tropes, but also because it depicts teenage male privilege at its most venomous and sociopathic. Just watch the scene where Dane DeHaan’s Andrew telekinetically rips out a bully’s teeth in the hall of his high school and, if you’re a dude, ask yourself if you didn’t have fevered revenge fantasies like that when you were his age. The final act turns into a generically explosive good-against-evil showdown, but up until that point, Chronicle is something genuinely terrifying and original. Trank has a deep admiration for the superhero genre and knows how to take it into the darkness without making your eyes roll. It’s too bad we’ll probably never see his fabled first cut of Fantastic Four — even if it’s bad, it’s undoubtedly fascinating.
Tobey Maguire was a supremely, delightfully odd choice to play Spider-Man. He’s not particularly funny, for one thing, and sharpened wit is a central aspect of the Spidey archetype. That archetype also requires relatable humanity, and Maguire’s mannerisms and line readings in Spider-Man give off the vibe of an alien wearing a human suit. But his performance, like the rest of Sam Raimi’s Spider debut, is as charming as it is awkward. Here is a movie where no one seems to be in the same movie, what with Willem Dafoe seemingly bored by everyone except himself (and he is fascinated by himself), James Franco operating in the transition zone between heartthrob and holier-than-thou artiste, Kirsten Dunst thinking she’s in another teen drama, and Maguire speaking directly to the viewer with his aforementioned eerie inelegance. Oh, and Macy Gray is there, too, for some reason. The result is an uneven mishmash that, nevertheless, confidently set the template for solo superhero origin stories.
(Exceprt) Read More at: Vulture.com
