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 The idea, I think, was that the superhero was a ridiculous and outdated form of American cultural lore, the…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…

A superhero movie comes out, but it doesn’t look like other superhero movies. The hero is black. So is the villain. So are almost all of the supporting characters. The movie touches on the main superhero-movie beats that we expect: the origin story, the demonstration of powers, the final battle with the equally…

It seemed ridiculous in 1992: the idea of a misshapen, braying lunatic running for higher office while barely bothering to disguise his own painfully obvious-bordering-on-theatrical creepiness. These days, would anyone blink? In fact, the biggest difference between Batman Returns and our own impossible present-day…

Rocketeers exist. There aren’t many of them, but they’re real. A few years ago, at an action movie festival in North Carolina, I met one. His name is Dan Schlund, and he’s a stunt performer who flies a gleaming silver rocket pack that doesn’t look too different from the one in the 1991 movie The Rocketeer. It doesn’t…

Sam Raimi wanted to make a superhero movie. After gifting the world with his absurdist 1987 horror-comedy masterpiece Evil Dead II, Raimi chased the rights to make movies out of both Batman and The Shadow. Both times, he failed. So he invented his own superhero—one who was really more of a deranged and revenge-crazed…

For a little while there, people were shaving the Batman insignia into their hair. That’s the level of cultural dominance that Tim Burton’s Batman had going for it in the summer of 1989. Batman made a ton of money—over $400 million globally, in 1989 dollars—but that’s really only the half of it.

It’s become a common complaint among movie lovers: Superhero movies have taken over, and it’s hard to get anything made if it doesn’t feature people in capes. In its own way, it’s a valid point. The superhero movie has become the dominant form of American popcorn cinema, playing the same function that genres like…