In the past decade, Hollywood has attempted to transform the franchise into something else: the cinematic universe. It’s a lofty and slightly absurd goal. Movies, we are now to understand, never exist as stand-alone stories, unless they’re arthouse flicks or Oscar bait (and even then, maybe not). They don’t exist as…

“The Marvel Universe has gone nuts; we’re going to have a fricking Captain America movie if we’re not careful.” This was Zack Snyder speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2008. Every once in a while, that quote finds itself recirculated online, evidence of Snyder’s philistine ideas about superhero movies and what a…

A funny thing happened to action movies in 2018: Horror movies swallowed them whole. This wasn’t an across-the-board thing, but a lot of the year’s best action movies weren’t just action movies. They existed in some lost B-movie nether region, a place where historically disrespected genres come together and commingle…

Scott Pilgrim is not a superhero. He is not a hero. He is only barely a functional human being. He is a dipshit. So maybe we should be talking about Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World in a column about dipshit movies, not one about superhero movies. (Side note: I would absolutely read a column about dipshit…

In a lot of ways, Watchmen, the comic series that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons started publishing in 1986, is a story about the folly of human ambition. It’s about superheroes, and yet there are no actual heroes in the book, super or otherwise. The characters dress up in masks and costumes to serve as forces of good,…

Midway through Christopher Nolan’s 2008 movie The Dark Knight, the Joker gets himself arrested so that he can then break out of his holding cell and continue his grand experiment in human darkness. While he’s locked up, he’s placed in the custody of the Major Crimes Unit, the police force that’s supposedly been…

Here’s a fun mental exercise: Describe Venom to a child. I’ve tried it. It’s ridiculous.

If Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins was the first movie to really take superheroes seriously, then maybe Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, released the following year, was the first movie to take superheroes too seriously. Singer even took the non-serious parts of his story too seriously. In retrospect, it’s hard to…

Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are as revered as any franchise of summer blockbusters can really be in this day and age. But when people make fun of them, they always seem to settle on one thing in particular: the Batman voice. When he’s in his Batman suit, Christian Bale doesn’t have too many long conversations,…

Nobody starts with the origin stories. At least when I first fell in love with comic books, the lure wasn’t the story arcs of these individual heroes. It was in finding out about this whole world full of outsized characters, many of whom had decades worth of interconnecting storylines. When I’d pick up individual…

It could’ve worked. Maybe it should’ve worked. You can understand what everyone involved was thinking. Superhero movies were making money. Marvel movies were making money. Just a year earlier, Spider-Man had been a global phenomenon. Superheroes weren’t necessarily nerd shit anymore. Computer-generated effects had…

Sony Pictures could’ve owned the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it could’ve owned it for cheap. The rights to the Spider-Man character had been bouncing around Hollywood for more than a decade before Sony finally got ahold of them in 1998. (The studio had to trade away to MGM its rights to make an alternate…

If you wanted to take a good, hard look at the difficulties of translating comic books into movies, Alan Moore makes a good case study. Moore is, by pretty much any serious criteria, one of the greatest comic book writers who has ever lived. He did not, of course, invent the genre, and he didn’t conceive vast armies…

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, the X-Men comics captured the collective imagination of the kids and teenagers who were willing to pay attention to comic books. The books had rich casts of characters. They had great storytelling, with long and ambitious plotlines that would stretch over months or even years. They had…

For whatever reason, a lot of the early superhero movies were also superhero-movie parodies. Before the genre was fully formed—before it was even close to fully formed—movies were using it as grist for jokes. The idea, I think, was that the superhero was a ridiculous and outdated form of American cultural lore, the…

Stan Lee always wanted to make movies. In the ’60s and ’70s, the comic book writer helped to create dozens of characters, and he also laid the groundwork for hundreds more to come into existence. He’d always had the idea that these characters belonged in movies. By 1981, he’d moved away from Marvel’s New York offices…

One of the first things we see in Batman & Robin, the movie that was supposed to be the big tentpole release for Warner Bros. in the summer of 1997, is Batman’s ass. It’s encased in black form-fitting rubber, and it completely fills the screen. This is part of an opening scene that plays out like a goth fetish-club…

They kept trying it. All through the 1990s, movie executives were greenlighting big summer movies based on mostly forgotten ’30s-vintage pulp superheroes. Clearly, people placed high within Hollywood’s largest studios thought that the teenagers of the ’90s, kids who had grown up buying gold-embossed collectors’…

You can see how it happened. The executives at Warner Bros. didn’t set out to destroy the Batman mythos or to make unwatchably shitty Batman movies that would put both the character and the superhero movie genre at large into a state of prolonged stasis. They just wanted a hit. Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, from 1992,…

The Crow is so weighed down with eerie, tragic coincidence that it’s almost hard to look at it as a real movie, rather than some mystic totem. Here we have a movie whose star, Brandon Lee, was killed in a freak on-set accident while filming his own character’s death. Lee’s father was, of course, Bruce Lee, a screen…