From Donner's Superman to The Dark Knight to Into the Spider-Verse. The genre's actually-good entries — not just the franchise tonnage.
The modern superhero film begins with Richard Donner's Superman (1978) and accelerates with Tim Burton's Batman (1989), Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000), and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002). The category has, in the twenty-five years since the X-Men launch, become the dominant commercial genre of mainstream cinema — and, increasingly, the most-criticised one.
Our picks are the films from the genre's last fifty years that have actually earned their reputations. We've kept the list short on purpose; tonnage is not what makes the genre good.
Three of the last five Best Director winners have made superhero films at some point in their careers — Christopher Nolan, Chloé Zhao, Sam Mendes is rumored to be developing one. The director who has been most-publicly critical of the genre is Martin Scorsese, whose 2019 New York Times essay describing the Marvel films as 'not cinema' triggered an industry-wide argument that has not subsided.
Scorsese's argument: superhero films, as a category, do not contain the level of risk, complexity, or surprise that defines art. The films are products of long-term franchise calculus and audience expectation management. The counter-argument, made by Joss Whedon and others, is that the same charge could be made against any commercially-successful genre — Westerns in the 1950s, musicals in the 1960s — and that the genre, like any genre, can be elevated by the right director and material. Both arguments have textual support.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has produced over thirty features. Most of them are well-made commercial entertainment. Few of them, on first viewing or rewatching, register as the kind of film one wants to discuss with someone afterwards. We've included three (Black Panther, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Endgame); the rest don't quite earn the list.
Same for DC: aside from the Nolan trilogy, Watchmen, Joker, and arguably Wonder Woman (2017), the post-2000 DC output has been uneven. The film school argument about the genre will continue as long as the genre keeps being made — which, by all current indicators, will be at least another decade.