The Top 10 Superhero Movies of All Time

In honor of The Avengers hitting American theaters at midnight tonight (and The Dark Knight Rises premiering in a few months), the Bill Kuchman Chronicle is offering its Top 10 Superhero Movies of All Time. A few brief rules: This list only counts superhero movies that are based on comics. So, sorry, Unbreakable, you can't make this list. Also, this list basically only counts superhero movies that have been released in the modern era since X-Men was released. Look, Superman: The Movie was a great movie and it established comic book movies as a real thing, but it doesn't hold up against what we've seen since 2000.

10. Thor
Thor was probably one of the hardest superhero movies to pull off over the past decade and a half. Marvel had established a realistic universe with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. Thor was something different — the introduction of the supernatural (yeah, they may call it science, but we'll call it magic) into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Moving toward The Avengers, Marvel needed Thor to be a success to merge the two worlds.

Director Kenneth Branagh brought a Shakespearian vibe to Thor, giving what could've been a light superhero movie the weight of an epic tale. Chris Hemsworth nailed it as Thor, and Tom Hiddleson shone as Loki. Without this movie being successful, The Avengers would have been in trouble.

9. Captain America
Much of what was said about Thor applies to Captain America. How could Marvel and director Joe Johnston bring Captain America to the big screen? Like Thor meshing the fantastical with the factual, Captain America needed to bring World War II into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. On top of that, Captain America has long stood as the leader of the Avengers. This film needed to establish the Cap as a leader and a fan favorite for The Avengers to showcase him.

Captain America was the superhero movie that pulled the Marvel Cinematic Universe together, adding Tony Stark's father, the Cosmic Cube and a hint of Asgard to the real world.

8. X-Men: First Class
It's not often that you get top-notch actors like Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy into a superhero movie, but X-Men: First Class made that happen. We often see reboots or awful prequels (cough, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, cough), but it's a rare thing to see a franchise get new life through a successful prequel. The X-Men franchise got just that with X-Men: First Class.

Fox and Marvel brought in a group of great actors (Jennifer Lawrence was an X-Man before she was ever representing District 12) and gave director Matthew Vaughn the ability to create a new world for the X-Men, a world that merged with not only the real world but also the X-Men movies that Bryan Singer had set up over the past decade.

7. Watchmen
No graphic novel is more sacred than Watchmen. It's been honored by Time magazine. It's been revered by fans of the medium for years. Zack Snyder took on quite the challenge when he signed on to bring Watchmen to the big screen. Some people may criticize Snyder for being too faithful to the source graphic novel, but I gotta say that Watchmen was perfect in almost every way. The casting was dead on, the score was great.

And you know what? Snyder's ending was far better than what Alan Moore had originally come up with. Yup, I said it. The inter-demensional squid thing was stupid. It always felt like it was randomly tacked onto the story. Snyder's idea of using the threat of Doctor Manhattan to unify humanity was so much better.

6. Spider-Man
I vividly remember Spider-Man hitting theaters, and I'll never forget the buzz that the movie carried with it, so it strikes me as odd to rank it at only No. 6 on my list of the Top 10 Superhero Movies of All Time. Spider-Man was something we rallied around less than a year after the Sept. 11 attacks. I remember dialing up Fandango (yeah, it used to be a phone thing) on the way to the theater to discover that the screening we hoped to go to was already sold out. No movie had ever had an opening weekend that topped $100 million. Spider-Man was the superhero movie we needed at this point in time. And boy, did it deliver.

5. Batman Begins
There are kids in this world today who have no knowledge of Batman and Robin or even Batman Forever. The only Batman they know is the one that exists in Christopher Nolan's mind, and that Batman changed how we view comic book movies forever.

When Batman Begins hit cinemas in 2005, fans were apprehensive. We had been hurt by Joel Schumacher and his desire to have nipples on the Batsuit. Years of false starts had convinced us that we'd never see a new Batman film. Batman Begins changed all of that. The film made it clear that a superhero movie could be serious, that it could exist in the real world and that Batman could rise from the glow-in-the-dark ashes of Schumacher.

4. Iron Man
The parallels between the summer of 2008 and the summer of 2012 are very interesting. Back in 2008, Iron Man kicked off the summer movie season by showing that Marvel had a grand scheme for superhero movies and that its plan was going to be a lot of fun. The Dark Knight followed a few months later, demonstrating that superhero movies could insert themselves into the Oscar conversation. Four years later, we have The Avengers in May and The Dark Knight Rises in July. Sounds familiar, huh?

Iron Man was a hell of a lot fun. We got to see Robert Downey Jr. finally re-establish himself as an A-list actor after years of self-destructive behavior. Just like fans got to see Superman fly decades ago, we got to see Iron Man take the skies. The film was fun, it was witty and it was awesome.

3. X2
While X-Men basically launched the current wave of superhero movies back in 2000, X2 took the franchise to a higher level. After getting his feet wet in X-Men, Bryan Singer took an ambitious approach to X2, exploring Wolverine's past and adding to the X-Men roster. The film opened with Nightcrawler's attack on the Oval Office — one of the greatest scenes in any superhero movie ever. From there, we eventually got to witness William Stryker's attack on the X-Mansion ... and Wolverine's berserker rage that followed.

The greatest disappointment of X2 was what followed. Brett Ratner took over the franchise with X-Men: The Last Stand and promptly failed in every possible way. The Dark Phoenix thread that Singer had carefully laid was ruined, characters were randomly killed off and the entire movie just sucked. X2 would have been fantastic on its own. What followed only enforced that.

2. Spider-Man 2
For several years, Spider-Man 2 stood alone at the top of the superhero movie list. It had everything. The continuation of a story that fans were familiar with. Great actors. A villain that audiences cared about. An engrossing story. And, one of the best movie soundtracks every (well, this and Batman Forever, that is).

Take a moment and think about Spider-Man 2 for a second. Start right after Doctor Octopus kidnaps Mary Jane Watson. Remember when Peter Park bursts from the rubble, regains his spider powers and takes off after Doc Ock. The fight on the clock tower. The brawl on a moving train. Spider-Man risking his life to stop that train from flying off the tracks. Spider-Man 2 was everything fans could've asked for.

1. The Dark Knight
Was there any doubt that The Dark Knight would top this list? No superhero movie in the history of cinema has ever delivered what The Dark Knight did. This film was as close to perfect as a film could get. Director Nolan and Christian Bale returning in roles they were familiar with, adding Heath Ledger as the Joker. If you're one of the few people who still holds Jack Nicholson's performance as the Joker in Batman as the best Joker, you've clearly lost it. Even if he hadn't died before The Dark Knight premiered, Ledger's performance would have earned him the Best Supporting Oscar. He was that good. No other movie on this list had an actor who so completely lost himself in his performance.

The Dark Knight brought superhero movies to a new level. The film deserved to be among the Best Picture nominations that year, but the Academy ignored it. It's widely recognized that this snub led to the change in the number of nominees that the Academy would honor every year. Can any other superhero movie say that they did this? No. The Dark Knight earned the top stop on this list.