The Best Superhero Movies, Ranked

Richard Donner shot it straight, and that is why it still works. Marlon Brando took $3.7 million plus 11.75% of the gross for a few minutes as Jor-El, and the film around him refused to wink. Watch the helicopter dangling off the Daily Planet roof: Lois falls, and a man in a cape catches both her and the aircraft. The 51st Academy Awards gave it a Special Achievement award for visual effects.

Sam Raimi built the best action beat the genre has out of a man's back: the runaway elevated train, stopped with webbing and a spine, then carried inside by the passengers he saved. Alfred Molina's tentacle rig weighed 100 pounds and took four crew members per arm; he called them Larry, Harry, Moe and Flo. Best Visual Effects at the 77th Academy Awards in 2005.

Parked at three on purpose, because the argument is worth having. Nolan opened with the bank heist, the first scene shot, filmed in IMAX over five days at the Old Chicago Main Post Office, and it plays as a Michael Mann picture that happens to contain a clown. Heath Ledger won a posthumous Best Supporting Actor at the 81st Academy Awards in 2009. Superb crime film; slightly embarrassed superhero film.

Best Animated Feature at the 91st Academy Awards, and the strongest case any film has made for the mask itself. Miles animates at twelve frames a second while Peter runs at twenty-four, so you literally watch him get better. The beat that matters is Miles spray-painting his own suit and stepping out of the window in it, because every superhero story is about earning the costume, and almost none show the work.

Two sick men and a car heading south, and it drew the first screenwriting Oscar nomination any live-action superhero film has had, for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 90th Academy Awards. Mangold also put out a black-and-white regrade, Logan Noir, which opened in US cinemas on 16 May 2017. Laura turns the grave marker sideways into an X at the end, and it lands because nothing before it was reverent.

Seven nominations at the 91st Academy Awards, three wins, and the first superhero film ever put up for Best Picture. Ryan Coogler solved the genre's villain problem by giving Killmonger a case nobody in Wakanda can answer. He gets the ending too, watching the sunset over the city and refusing the cell. A blockbuster that argues with itself about isolationism is rarer than another origin story.

Fifty thousand protest letters reached Warner Bros. over casting Michael Keaton, a comedy actor, in the suit; the film then took $411.6 million worldwide. Tim Burton's Gotham is openly a set, and better for it. Prince wrote and performed the songs, which is why the Joker's parade, all floats and cash raining down on the crowd and a pop record blaring, is the most disreputable sequence any studio put in a Batman picture.

Warner Bros. moved it from direct-to-video to cinemas late, leaving Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski an eight-month schedule; it opened on 25 December 1993 in 1,506 theaters and took $5.8 million against a $6 million budget. Almost nobody saw it, and it is the purest version of the character on film. Bruce kneels at his parents' graves and asks to be let out of the promise.

Joss Whedon had to make six franchises share one movie and got $1.521 billion for it, the first Marvel production past a billion and the third-highest-grossing film of all time on release. Everything the studio has done since is a footnote to the circling shot that lands all six of them in one frame on a Manhattan street. Thin as a film; as a superhero film it is the entire point.

Casting Robert Redford as Alexander Pierce told you exactly what Anthony and Joe Russo were doing in 2014: a 1970s paranoid thriller wearing a shield. The elevator fight is the proof, with ten men in a confined box and Steve Rogers offering everyone a chance to walk out first. Marvel has never again let one of its films be this suspicious of its own institutions.

Six animation styles, roughly a thousand people on the crew, the largest ever put on an animated feature, and $690.8 million worldwide. Gwen's Earth-65 is the reason to watch: watercolour that bleeds and re-tints as her mood shifts, so an argument with her father plays out in moving pigment. It then stops mid-sentence with no third act, which is why it sits here rather than five places higher.

Matt Reeves and cinematographer Greig Fraser lit a comic-book film using golden-hour references pulled from In the Mood for Love, and a Nirvana song turns up twice. Nearly three hours of a detective actually detecting, for $772.3 million worldwide. The freeway chase ends with the Penguin's car flipping and the camera staying upside down as Batman walks toward it through fire. Then it drowns Gotham and loses its nerve.

Nothing after the cave workshop matters much, since what follows is a competent 2008 action movie, but a man building his way out of a hole from a box of scrap is why the whole business took. Jon Favreau started filming without a finished script, so the dialogue was largely improvised, and Robert Downey Jr., paid $500,000, improvised the closing press-conference line himself.

Opening on a beaten man face-down in the snow was not the choice anyone expected: Krypto hauls him to the Fortress of Solitude and robot servants put him back together. James Gunn built the dog from his own rescue, Ozu, and a dog actor called Jolene stood in on set. Released on 11 July 2025, it took $618.7 million worldwide. Sincerity, played straight, still works.

Alan Cumming sat four hours a day for Nightcrawler's makeup, and the payoff is the first five minutes: a teleporting mutant bamfing through the Secret Service down a White House corridor, still the best cold open the genre has managed. Bryan Singer's 2003 sequel took $407.7 million worldwide. Every serious mutant film since, Logan included, is working from this template.

Highest-grossing R-rated film ever made, $1.338 billion, out in the United States on 26 July 2024, and it is a lap of honor rather than a film, which is exactly why it belongs last. Shawn Levy opens with a credits fight choreographed around an exhumed skeleton to an NSYNC record, setting the tone: nostalgia used as a weapon. Vote it off if you like. Something has to represent what the genre became.