Superhero movies have been all the rage for years, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe dominating the box office since its 2008 debut and the upcoming DCU reboot turning heads. However, even before that, superhero movies were a big part of the cinematic landscape, even stretching back into the days of the black-and-white era, when superhero serials were part of matinées. Unfortunately, they can't all be gems, and some superhero films have hurt the genre's reputation.
Everyone has a favorite superhero film and has seen a movie bad enough to kill the genre for them. Infamous movies like Batman V Superman and Suicide Squad showed the depths even superhero movies with strong concepts can sink into.
10 Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice
The DCEU made many mistakes, many of which can be laid at the feet of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Here, Warner Brothers did the most DC thing ever – add Batman into a Superman story – but that didn't make the story worth it. While it borrowed plot points from multiple comics, it somehow found a way to mischaracterize every character in the movie.
Batman V Superman's tone was ridiculously grimdark, and the story had to cram too much into one movie. The second DCEU movie was a box office success that gained a vocal minority of fans but also turned off general audiences. The movie has some good stuff, even if it's overwhelmed by its myriad problems.
9 Spider-Man 3
Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 were loved by both critics and fans. It's not an exaggeration to say that everyone loved them, and certain generations of fans still think of them fondly. However, Spider-Man 3 not only dropped that ball, but kicked it away. The biggest problem in SM3 isn't its tonal whiplash, but cramming too much into one movie.
Spider-Man 3 had three clear villains, each with longwinded plots: Harry Osborn going after Spider-Man for revenge as the New Goblin, Peter's struggle with the alien symbiote, leading to Eddie Brock Jr. becoming Venom, Sandman's tragic story, and how it tied into Peter's past. Even more, Gwen Stacy and MJ showed up., so there was relationship drama. It's a mess of a movie that destroyed a very successful franchise.
8 Barb Wire
The mid-'90s were a precursor to the superhero boom of the late '00s and '10s, as studios thought that superhero movies were the next big thing thanks to the success of the Batman movies. However, instead of depending on familiar offerings from Marvel and DC, the mid-'90s saw several indie characters adapted to the screen, most of which crashed and burned.
Barb Wire was based on the Dark Horse character from "Comics Greatest World," and starred Pamela Anderson as the titular character. However, the movie was a bizarre retelling of Casablanca. Anderson was never a great actress, but the material she was given was anemic at best. There's really nothing to redeem this film.
7 X3: The Last Stand
20th Century Fox's X-Men movies started strong, but things fell through in X3: The Last Stand. Meant to adapt the classic "Dark Phoenix Saga," it also added Magneto and the Brotherhood, the mutant cure portion of the Astonishing X-Men story "Gifted." It introduced new characters like Angel and Kitty Pryde. It killed Cyclops and Xavier and tried to stuff three films' worth of content into an hour and a half.
The first two X-Men movies weren't the best adaptations, but they grabbed fans. X3 was both a terrible adaptation and a waste of goodwill. The biggest superhero franchises of the '00s had problems with their third parts, and X3 was the worst.
6 Ant-Man
Ant-Man's tenure in the MCU is probably the strangest of them all. Scott Lang was a C-lister in the comics, and getting a movie instead of the original Ant-Man Hank Pym mystified many fans. Casting Paul Rudd as Lang built Ant-Man a lot of goodwill with fans, but the movie committed cinema's greatest sin — it was bland.
The MCU doesn't need to all be big-stakes stories, but Ant-Man fails because it never really presents a strong argument for its existence. It follows the MCU origin formula laid out by Iron Man, but unlike that movie, it has nothing other than humor and Rudd and Michael Piña's charm. In the end, nothing can save a weak story.
5 Suicide Squad (2016)
Coming out after Batman v Superman's critical drubbing, 2016's Suicide Squad was immediately controversial. The trailers made before BvS's failure and those released after seemingly changed the film's tone completely. The movie was recut and edited as WB tried to make it funnier and quippier, with mixed results. The movie was a success at the box office, but that was it.
The first Suicide Squad is a tonal mess. It doesn't know if it's trying to be funny or serious. Jared Leto's Joker was an unabashed failure. Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn was beloved, but other than that, the movie was just bad, misusing the Suicide Squad and playing into the DCEU's worst tropes.
4 Thor: The Dark World
The MCU's Phase Two was where the cracks first started to show in the towering edifice that was Marvel Studios. There were massive hits like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy, but also lackluster installments like Iron Man 3, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and most infamously, Thor: The Dark World.
Thor: The Dark World is widely regarded as the worst MCU movie. MCU villains are known for their generic qualities, but Malekith was especially terrible. The story was a clichéd MacGuffin quest, and it floundered as it tried to find a tone. It may not have bombed at the box office, but it bombed in fans' minds.
3 The Spirit
Writer/artist Frank Miller got his first taste of Hollywood by co-directing Sin City. Snyder's adaptation of his comic 300 was another hit, and eventually, Miller got a chance to direct a superhero movie with The Spirit. Adapting legendary writer/artist Will Eisner's classic pulp superhero, Miller seemed a perfect fit for the film.
The Spirit was an inscrutable mess. While it utilized the visual stylings of Sin City, it didn't do nearly as well as Miller's previous co-directing job. The Spirit wasn't well known and was trying to bank on Sin City's name recognition. This didn't work at all, as Miller's skill as a director only seemed evident when he was making a movie alongside Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.
2 Superman IV: The Quest For Peace
The first two Superman movies are beloved, but the third is where things turned. It didn't make as much money at the box office as the last two, and the fourth movie was in trouble from the start. The production company Cannon took over, the budget was slashed to bare-bones levels, and while Christopher Reeve's performance was earnest, the story never coalesced.
Superman movies were massively popular in their heyday, but Superman IV ended that. It was corny and poorly done, and its failure ended Superman's big-screen adventures until 2006. 2025's upcoming Superman: Legacy has a lot riding on it, and it needs to sidestep Superman IV's sizeable mistakes.
1 Batman & Robin
Batman & Robin is terrible, and it ended the first big Batman franchise. The writing had been on the wall during Batman Forever, which moved away from former director Tim Burton's gothic style and toward cartoonish camp. Joel Schumacher was told to make the movie more toy friendly, and he went overboard with B&R's notoriously colorful style.
Batman & Robin is hilarious in all the wrong ways. It's not a good story, but everyone looks like they're having fun, so there's that. Batman movies were considered licenses to print money at the time, but this bomb almost ruined superhero films for a generation.