The dominant commercial genre of the 21st century. Here's what's actually good — and why some directors won't touch it.
The modern superhero film begins with Richard Donner's Superman (1978), accelerates with Tim Burton's Batman (1989), and becomes the dominant commercial genre of mainstream cinema after Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000) and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002). By 2010 the genre was producing $1bn+ blockbusters routinely; by 2019 Avengers: Endgame had grossed $2.79bn worldwide.
This page is the genre hub. We've split by tradition.
A small subset of superhero films have engaged the genre at the level of dramatic seriousness usually reserved for non-genre cinema. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008) is the canonical example — a comic-book IP film built on the visual and structural foundations of Michael Mann's Heat (1995). Logan (2017), James Mangold's Wolverine exit, applied the Western to the X-Men character. Joker (2019) made a $60m R-rated character study from a Batman villain and grossed a billion dollars.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe — launched with Iron Man (2008) and concluded (as a structural project) with Avengers: Endgame (2019) — is the most-elaborately-engineered franchise project in the history of cinema. Twenty-two films over eleven years, shot in roughly chronological story order, with a Phase structure announced years in advance.
Critics on Martin Scorsese's side of the 2019 'not cinema' argument see the MCU as a continuation of the industrial-product tradition — well-made entertainment that does not require the artistic risk-taking that defines art. Critics on the other side see it as a working studio system delivering consistent commercial entertainment for global audiences at a scale almost no other studio has managed. Both readings are defensible.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) is, by significant margin, the most-influential animated superhero film. Its visual approach — combining 24fps, 12fps, and 18fps animation in the same frame, hand-drawn line work over CGI base layers, period comic-book composition techniques translated into motion — has been imitated across the animation industry for a decade.
The sequel Across the Spider-Verse (2023) extended the approach; the third film, Beyond the Spider-Verse, is in production.
DC's film output has been more uneven than Marvel's. The high points: Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy (Batman Begins 2005, The Dark Knight 2008, The Dark Knight Rises 2012), Patty Jenkins's Wonder Woman (2017), Matt Reeves's The Batman (2022). The low points: the Snyder-era Justice League material, several Suicide Squad attempts, Black Adam.
The James Gunn-led DC Studios reset, announced in 2023, is the current attempt to rebuild the property.