Putting together a Top 10 list of the best superhero movies of all time may just be the critical equivalent of trying to herd thunder through a spreadsheet. Are we rating the best-made movie, the most influential or the most emotionally ruinous? The genre has exploded over the past 20 years to the point where it long ago swallowed cinema whole: we have crime sagas (most Batman flicks), family comedies (The Incredibles, Guardians of the Galaxy), cultural and political allegories (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, X-Men, Black Panther), pop-art fever dreams (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and even tales of Wagnerian apocalypse (Watchmen, Avengers: Infinity War).
The sense is that these movies are too varied, the emotional criteria too slippery, the personal attachments some of us have to them too embarrassingly primal, to be placed in a clear hierarchy. Is the No 1 comic book movie of all time the film that made fangirls and boys whimper into their crumpled copies of Amazing Fantasy #15? In which case we might be looking at Spider-Man: No Way Home. Or is it the picture that’s so good it appeals to filmgoers who don’t actually like superhero flicks? That would be The Dark Knight. Is Matt Reeves’ gloriously offbeat, Fincher-esque The Batman too weird and languid to make the list? And does Patty Jenkins’ breezily old-fashioned Wonder Woman get downgraded because it was part of a superhero universe that ultimately tanked?
