Hate superhero movies? 35 movies to change your mind
Jun. 28, 2024For anyone fatigued by avengers who assemble, these rebel superheroes might save your movie night
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If superheroes saving the world from VFX-heavy bad guys has you feeling numb, you’re not the only one. While superhero movies are easily the most popular movie genre of the 21st century, constant domination has made more than a few people feeling fatigued. But might there be a few transgressive superhero movies that can entertain even the most hardcore cynics? Turns out, yes, there are quite a few.
Superhero movies have been around since the beginning of cinema, with scholars naming Mandrake the Magician from 1939 and The Shadow from 1940 as being the first true superhero movies. Eventually the biggest comic book superheroes like Captain Marvel, Superman, and Batman all enjoyed prominence as film serial icons.
With decades of endless superhero movies, surely many are feeling just a little tired. But if you’re truly an anti-superhero movie person, or looking for something fresh in a stale genre, seek out these 35 movies to change your mind.
33. The Super Inframan (1975)
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Childhood dreams clash with the harsh realities of adulthood in Takashi Miike’s superhero comedy Zebraman. Disrespected by his students and even his own family, a middle-aged man (Show Aikawa) dons the costume of his favorite television superhero Zebraman. After exhibiting real superpowers, “Zebraman” is called into action to save the world from an actual alien invasion, all while avoiding the same fate as his boyhood idol. Takashi Miike again focuses his cameras on his favorite kind of subjects - iconoclasts living extraordinary lives in the margins of modern life - to reveal how even absolute zeroes can become heroes.
No one needs an introduction to Batman. But for anyone allergic to the deafening noise of big-budget productions, Matt Reeves' singular take on the Batman legend is one hell of an antidote. Set in its own universe, The Batman stars Robert Pattinson as a Batman still early in his crime-fighting career as he tracks down an elusive serial killer calling himself The Riddler (Paul Dano). Though still a major Hollywood production, Reeves' crime noir-inspired interpretation casts a different shade over the Caped Crusader, drenching him in acid rain and surrounding him with shadowy city dwellers. Sure, The Batman is still a “dark Batman movie,” of which there’s no shortage of. But that doesn’t stop The Batman from feeling like one of a kind.
While Guyver is an established sci-fi franchise in Japan with various manga and anime adaptations, two low-budget Hollywood movies took the Japanese superhero into the American underground. In 1991, special effects wizards Steve Wang and Screaming Mad George collaborated as directors on The Guyver, with Jack Armstrong playing a California martial artist who comes in contact with an alien device that turns him into a superhero. Mark Hamill appears in a supporting role of a CIA agent, though the movie’s misleading poster made it seem like Hamill morphs into The Guyver. The sequel Guyver: Dark Hero released in 1994, being a more action-oriented installment with less comedic gags; Metal Gear Solid’s David Hayter replaces Armstrong in the lead role. Both films are strong introductions to the tokusatsu genre, which were briefly in vogue in the early 1990s amid the success of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
Before taking control of the entire DC Universe, James Gunn applied his DIY spirit and Troma heritage to the superhero genre with the underrated, overlooked Super. A black comedy-drama with an all-star cast - including Rainn Wilson, Elliot Page, Liv Tyler, and even Kevin Bacon - Super tells the story of a pathetic fry cook named Frank (Wilson) whose recovering addict wife (Tyler) has left him for a sleazy strip club owner (Bacon). Fearing his wife has relapsed under her new boyfriend’s influence, Frank dons the mask of the Crimson Bolt to save her and take down her boyfriend’s underworld empire. Before Gunn broke box office records, his star-studded indie Super made us question whose lives, precisely, are really saved by superheroes.
In the same year thatSonyand Marvel’s Venom grossed a monstrous $850 million worldwide, director Leigh Whannell delivered a more vicious version of a similar story. In Upgrade, Logan Marshall-Green plays a paralyzed mechanic named Grey. While mourning the senseless murder of his beautiful wife (Melanie Vallejo), Grey is injected with a cutting-edge A.I. implant that not only helps him regain motor functions, but turns him into a lethal killing machine. While Grey embarks on a road to avenge his wife, the implant slowly reveals its own agenda. Taut and thrilling, Upgrade is the anti-superhero movie Venom wishes it could be.
Bruce Lee’s first big break in Hollywood was portraying the masked martial artist Kato, sidekick to Van Williams in the pulp TV series The Green Hornet in 1966. Lee’s legacy influenced many around the world, including Chinese comics artist Li Chi Tak. In 1992, Tak released his superhero comic Black Mask, about a masked vigilante with a striking resemblance to Kato. In 1996, action star Jet Li kicked his career into high gear starring in a film adaptation of Black Mask, where Li plays a quiet librarian with a secret identity as a top secret super soldier. Black Mask is a blast, if only for its attractive showcase of Jet Li in his physical prime.
BeforeDisneysimply bought its superhero brands, Disney - through studioPixar- created its own throwback-flavored franchise with Brad Bird’s spy-fi homage The Incredibles. A tribute to Golden and Silver Age science fiction and superhero comics, The Incredibles takes place in a universe where superheroes are outlawed and the last generation of them hide in plain sight. When Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) comes out of retirement, followed shortly by his own wife Elasti-Girl (Holly Hunter), he discovers the truth behind his fellow heroes' downfall. Between Brad Bird’s blazing direction, a universally relatable story about work/life imbalances, and a pulsating score by Michael Giacchino, The Incredibles proves superhero epics don’t need big IP branding to save the day.
What do you get when you mix Sam Raimi, superhero movies, and Raimi’s affections for the Universal Monsters? Enter: Darkman. Starring Liam Neeson in the title role, Darkman tells of a scientist named Dr. Westlake who is left for dead, only to be healed back to life with new superpowers. Now seeking to repair his life, including his relationship to his girlfriend Julie (Frances McDormand), Westlake dons the identity of “Darkman” to exact vengeance against those who ruined his life. Predating Raimi’s own Spider-Man film series, Darkman sees the splatter auteur draw from other movies like The Elephant Man and The Shadow to bring his own original hero to the big screen, with all the usual Raimi pizazz his fans expect.
Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe truly boomed, Matthew Vaughn adapted Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s original comic book series Kick-Ass to the big screen. Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as dweeby high school student Dave who turns himself into a vigilante superhero - the internet sensation Kick-Ass - and gets caught up in another superhero duo’s mission to take down a crime boss. (Nicolas Cage and Chloë Grace Moretz co-star, as the father/daughter team Big Daddy and Hit-Girl.) While Kick-Ass’ gleeful R-rated take on superheroes feels passé in a post-Deadpool world, Kick-Ass still hits hard.
Hellboy wasn’t the first superhero comic that celebrated filmmaker Guillermo del Toro applied his craft. (That honor goes to Blade II.) But Hellboy features so much more of del Toro’s signature touches that it’s easy to forget Hellboy was first a comic book by Mike Mignola. The movie details Hellboy’s origins, as a demon from Hell raised by a gentle scientist during World War II, and grows up into a top secret federal agent. Ron Perlman memorably fills the combat boots of Hellboy, while Selma Blair co-stars, in a picture that renders Mignola’s already gorgeous and textured art into three dimensions. It’s just one hell of a good time.
Alongside the Wesley Snipes-led Blade, X-Men from director Bryan Singer ushered in the modern superhero movie boom. (That movie also introduced Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, easily one of the most effective casting decisions in Hollywood history.) Three years after X-Men’s theatrical release in 2000, Singer’s sequel X2: X-Men United upped the ante, with a politically charged action tentpole in which Brian Cox - nearly 20 years before starring in HBO’s Succession - plays a military colonel with plans to rid the world, but primarily America, of mutants for good. Overall faster-paced and more exciting than its predecessor without sacrificing quality, X2: X-Men United is truly the best of mutantkind.
A dieselpunk superhero takes flight in this retro-nostalgic adventure from director Joe Johnston, adapting Dave Stevens' original comic book character. Released in 1991 from Walt Disney Studios, The Rocketeer stars Billy Campbell as a 1930s stunt pilot who comes across a cutting-edge jetpack, which he uses to become the flying avenger Rocketeer. A lively throwback to the bygone pulp heroes of yesteryear, The Rocketeer mixes the gee-whiz innocence of Saturday matinée serials with more modern blockbuster standards. 20 years later, Johnston would revisit a similar aesthetic and time period to envision a different hero altogether: Captain America, for Captain America: The First Avenger.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' seminal comic book series Watchmen is untouchable, a cerebral and socio-political deconstruction of the superhero genre profoundly informed by post-Vietnam and Cold War anxieties as it concerns the fate of the world. While Moore disowns all adaptations of his stories, his Watchmen got the once-thought-impossible Hollywood treatment from 300 directorZack Snyder. Visually faithful to the material while still missing the thematic point entirely, Watchmen is a magnificent late-aughts epic that recycles Moore and Gibbons' same fears about the world and recontextualizes them in a climate shaped by the War on Terror and sudden economic recession.
Before superhero franchise villains like Loki and The Penguin enjoyed starring in their own TV shows, Toei saw some spin-off potential in the antagonist Hakaider who originated in the 1972 tokusatsu TV classic Android Kikaider. In Mechanical Violator Hakaider, a stand-alone 1995 sci-fi film directed by Keita Amemiya, Hakaider awakens in an undetermined future timeline and uses his powers to defend a utopian village. Although Mechanical Violator Hakaider didn’t launch a revival for the Kikaider franchise, the movie alone enjoys underground cult status as a rip-roaring midnight action flick.
While its memorably dark and grungy vibe is owed to director Alex Proyas and a soundtrack with Nine Inch Nails and The Cure, The Crow soars decades later because of lead actor Brandon Lee, who died in a freak accident during filming. Lee’s charisma and handsome visage haunt The Crow, in an eerily fitting superhero story about a vengeful rock star who comes back to life one year after his family’s murder on Halloween. Long before movie stars lost their aura to the superhero figures they flesh out, The Crow - based on the comic by James O’Barr - was a genuine synthesis of superhero lore and magnetic lead who actually breathed life into them.
Just as the Marvel Cinematic Universe was properly taking off, the short-lived Marvel Knights existed as a production arm under Marvel Studios to adapt Marvel’s darker, lesser known characters to the screen. Four years after Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Punisher, filmmaker Lexi Alexander - truly the first woman to direct a Marvel movie - was given the reins over her stand-alone reboot/sequel, Punisher: War Zone. Taking even more inspiration from the Punisher comics, Punisher: War Zone is a disarmingly gorgeous midnight action movie with chiaroscuro contrast lighting and an imposing Ray Stevenson in the role of Frank Castle. Punisher: War Zone doesn’t posture to be more than what it is. Instead, it doubles down on exactly what you think a Punisher movie to look and feel like, and the result is nothing short of extraordinary.
Mainstream audiences had yet to fully grasp superhero movies when M. Night Shyamalan unleashed his cerebral deconstruction of the genre in his unforgettable thriller Unbreakable. Bruce Willis plays David Dunn, a family man and security guard who slowly discovers his impossible gifts. He is “mentored” by an eccentric comic book art collector Elijah (Samuel L. Jackson), himself a physically frail individual, who lectures him on the meaning of his destiny - although he has ulterior motives, too. Unlike most other superhero movies out there, Unbreakable is methodical and deliberate in its storytelling, a muscular interpretation of superhero conventions minus the indignities of convoluted, overproduced production. In concert with an elegant score by James Newton-Howard, and you’ve got something close to a perfect movie.
All superheroes trace their origins back to Superman, whose comic book debut in 1938, hoisting a car on the cover of Action Comics #1, birthed the modern superhero we know today. Decades later, amid national crises like Vietnam and Watergate, Richard Donner made the world believe a man could fly with Superman: The Movie. Although the film is indeed the ur-text for the modern superhero blockbuster, Superman still holds up like unbendable steel as a romantic and idealistic vision of superheroes in our “real” world. They’re not always arbiters of destruction, but living examples of truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.
Eric Francisco is a freelance entertainment journalist and graduate of Rutgers University. If a movie or TV show has superheroes, spaceships, kung fu, or John Cena, he’s your guy to make sense of it. A former senior writer at Inverse, his byline has also appeared at Vulture, The Daily Beast, Observer, and The Mary Sue. You can find him screaming at Devils hockey games or dodging enemy fire in Call of Duty: Warzone.
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