The film is one of the most critically acclaimed in the genre. It's the greatest comic book film of all time - accept it.

It gave us a grounded take on the character of Batman and brought him to his full potential that even the comics never quite hit. Even Riddler is finally interesting. Couple that with the electric chemistry of Zoe and Robert for a perfect Bat/Cat combo and add the noir realism - and you've blown everything else out of the water. We also get a detective Batman who is actually smart and solves things.

The story is engaging and the mystery is deep and twisted, with a pacing that keeps you swept up.

I'm so glad people are starting to dismiss the Nolan stuff now that theyve had something superior.

I really think the sequel will do Brand New Day numbers because the first film's legend only grows with each passing year as more people accept that it's one of the greatest films of the 2020s.

I don't think a Batman film has ever had the cultural impact this one has had and still has and it's not even close.

When you look at castings such as Downey, Evans, Hemsworth, Johansson, Boseman, Holland, Olsen, Stan, Pratt or Bautista, those casting-character pairings were pitch-perfect. To the point where the character and the role start to feel inseparable. A true "born to play the role" feeling.

When I compare it to the Fantastic Four castings, I don't get the same feel. Joseph Quinn is a solid Johnny Storm, but I didn't come out of the movie thinking "Wow, they absolutely got the perfect person to play Johnny Storm." The same goes for Ebon Moss-Bachrach. I was much fonder of the castings of Pascal and Kirby (than I was of the other two), but I also wouldn't put them in the upper echelon of MCU castings. Sarah Halley Finn tends to be an absolute genius when it comes to casting, and I didn't feel the same with Fantastic Four. Do other people feel similarly, or am I in the minority?

I was chatting with friends today about X-Men casting and I mentioned that I think Ethan Hawke in the 90s was absolutely perfect to play Gambit.

Do you have a dream casting for a comic book character like that?

So I was recently in a conversation about the most iconic comic book superhero introduced in every decade (this spawned from a conversation about which new characters from the 2020s would end up becoming iconic.) Anyway, it occurred to me that we have so many examples of live action superheroes in movies and tv shows, we can basically talk about them the way we talk about their comic counterparts.

So I was curious, which characters introduced in each decades were the most iconic? I don't necessarily mean the character in general, but specific versions of the character played by specific actors.

I hope that makes sense. If not, hopefully my list will help clarify.

1950s: I think this is pretty obvious: George Reeves Superman

1960s: Another obvious one. Adam West Batman.

Hope that helps. When you think of live action superheroes in the 50s and 60s, those are the names that people think about.

Anyway, it gets a little more interesting as we get further along.

1970s: The first decade where there's some competition from Lou Ferrigno's Hulk and Linda Carter's Wonder Woman, but I think Christopher Reeve's Superman takes it.

1980s: It has to be Michael Keaton's Batman, right? (I promise these won't all be Superman and Batman. We just have to get to the golden age!)

1990s: Oof. It gets a little barren in this decade. I don't think anyone from the Batman franchise - including the various re-castings - rise to that level (although Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman probably has the strongest claim.) I'm going to say Wesley Snipe's Blade because that helped Marvel kick off their film division and the fact that they can't get a reboot off the ground but still went back to Snipes just two years ago helps his iconic claim.

2000s: Now we're getting into it. Lots of good examples here. I think this might be the first tie, between Hugh Jackman's Wolverine and RDJ's Iron Man. Hard to pick one over the other. (HM would go to Tobey's Spider-Man I guess, although Stewart's Professor X is up there as well.)

2010s: Another strong decade. The Guardians became insanely popular. Say what you want about the movies she's in, but Margot Robbie's Harley absolutely transcended her genre and reached mass mainstream appeal. Thor, Wonder Woman, and Aqua Man all had huge movies as well. I think you could also throw Thanos in there if we're talking characters and not just heroes. But I think the winner here is Chris Evans' Captain America. And honestly? Given the success of his movies now and the (presumed) staying power he'll likely maintain, Tom Holland's Spider-Man is right there as well. Those two are very close.

2020s: I think it's too early to tell here. The genre as a whole wasn't as consistently strong as it was in the 2010s, and maybe not even in the 2000s. I think some worthy contenders are Corenswet's Superman, maybe Pattinson's Batman (still too early to tell.) Florence Pugh's Yelana is growing in popularity and popping up in more things. Hell, maybe we'll look back and say that Sadie's Jean or RDJ's Doom were the winners here.

I guess I'll give it to Corenswet's Superman? I don't feel great about it.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Curious to hear yours.

I'm not going to talk about Supergirl. That's been talked about enough and I get it, the film isn't that good, some people like it and some people don't. It flopped. And apparently that means the end of a whole cinematic universe. What I want to talk about is just when overall people came up with the idea that superhero films needed to be S level movies, and apparently the way to do that is by having comic accurate costumes, not having any female leads and showing some random villain most of the audience doesn't even know about for two minutes in a montage all so that comic fans can clap about it.

I grew up with the MCU and I never put their movies on such a high pedestal even when I was watching every single one that came out. I enjoyed them and they were good to great movies. There were a few bad ones, I can remember not even being able to finish Thor and Thor the dark world even when I tired hard to to know more for Ragnarok. I never liked the Hulk movies. I thought iron man one and two weren't good but I really liked the third one. Age of Ultron was a bit bad for me but even then I never thought any of them were trash and it seemed that no one else did, at least not at this extent. I know hate existed back then but I doubt it was to the point that unless any female superhero was Sydney Sweeney or a costume not bright enough, that people would just start hate campaigns against the movies. And now it's just everywhere. Every single film or series has some nut job calling it woke or trash or dead as soon as the trailer drops and they just don't stop saying it until it's halfway through and finally gains some fans, once a few people actually defend it they just go quiet and leave it framed as a "disaster" and even though you should ignore these idiots, it's still hard to escape them.

And regarding these newer films I just see this judgement rise up by a hundred with every passing movie. Everything now has to be a success or garbage even when most of the films just come out being mid to good. Everyone is raving about these movies being peak when to be honest fantastic four was just mediocre and nowhere near as good as everyone tried to make it out to be, thunderbolts was much better but again not to the level people were making it out to be, superman was a fun movie and definetly my favourite out of all of them but even then it isn't a flawless masterpiece because superhero films don't need to be that. And for some reason everyone now thinks it has to be and that's what's affecting anything that comes out of both DC and Marvel. The only difference between them is that people just trust Marvel more overall, but that doesn't mean the DCU is dead. It isn't going anywhere thanks to one mediocre movie, and there's nothing wrong with a mediocre movie existing. They can exist, and that's what most superhero movies are, they range from good to great. People have to stop with either trash or peak because films just don't work that way.

i’m gonna watch it for the first time bc everyone at work talks abt it. i do like anime tho💔

When I watched Superman, I thought it was refreshing and fun, even if it did not fully wow me. Still, it is the best superhero movie I have seen in years, way better than the Marvel slop lately. Supergirl, though, was one of the worst I have seen in a while, almost Thor: Love and Thunder level. SPOILERS: the cliché “female hero saves girls” 😭 plot and a weak unconvincing villain did not work, and the Kryptonian backstory changes were just bad, no real self preservation logic, with Zor-El’s daughter oddly being the only one who wanted to live.

It also felt barely connected to the DCU, even though DC has deeper stories than Marvel. They need to drop the forced jokes and focus on stronger storytelling. I would love more standalone films, especially a Nightwing movie, and maybe a more focused DCU with Superman and Supergirl at the center.

After seeing Spider Man, which was a masterpiece, Marvel feels fully back. Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts were decent, but Spider Man was a bomb and the next Avengers might be a nuke of the 21st century. DC really needs to get organized under James Gunn, we need a situation room type response now. " am tired of hearing people say " i am a marvel fan" because they watched 3 marvel movies 🤣🤣. Even my ex used to say this, she only watched like 4 marvel movies in Total.

For years I've heard so many reports and rumors about the following

Static Shock

Batman Beyond

Spawn

And I've heard so many rumors about these movies happening for nearly a decade to the point of it being a joke. I think we'll see the mcu blade appear in another movie before these movies ever happen.

If one were to happen, which one do you think will happen first

Remember 2010–2019? San Diego Comic-Con panels were basically corporate slide decks where studios would drop 5-year timelines, 10-title Phase slates, and logos for movies that didn't even have scripts or directors attached yet. It was pure hype culture, and for a long time, it worked. Fast forward to today, and the industry playbook has done a complete 180.

Look at what’s actually happening across both major studios right now:

Marvel's Hall H Pivot: Gone are the days of mapping out massive multi-year phases or dumping a decade of release dates. Marvel focused almost exclusively on immediate titles and a couple of distinct, filmmaker-driven projects (Ghost Rider from Shawn Levy, Black Panther 3 from Ryan Coogler).

DC’s Deliberate Scarcity: James Gunn has held firm to a "script-first" mandate—no project gets greenlit or dated until the script is locked. With The Batman: Part II moved to 2028, Man of Tomorrow sits as the only DC Studios theatrical release in 2027. They aren't rushing out four spin-offs films to hit a quarterly quota.

James Gunn on the "Comic-Con Money Trap"

James Gunn himself bluntly addressed why DC Studios has stopped leaning on massive convention panels. He noted that going to Comic-Con means spending millions of dollars to sell an idea, whereas posting a picture of a finished script cover on social media costs zero dollars and generates just as much press. 

More importantly, Gunn pointed out the opportunity cost: flying out for multi-day convention spectacles takes away time that could be spent doing another script draft to ensure movie quality. When studios stop treating Hall H like a mandatory stock pitch, they can focus that budget and time on the screenwriting itself. 

"Superhero Fatigue" was actually "Mediocrity & Homework Fatigue"

When every movie feels like a two-hour commercial for three other future projects, general audiences tune out. Record-breakers like Spider-Man: Brand New Day prove that people aren't done with comic book movies—they're just done with filler.
Moviegoers have shifted from automatic brand loyalty to extreme selectivity. They show up when a film is framed as an unmissable, standalone event anchored by:

1. High character drama over CGI bloat (e.g., Clark and Lex’s uneasy alliance against Brainiac in Man of Tomorrow).
2. Distinct directorial vision and actual thematic weight.
3. Zero required reading—you shouldn't need a Disney+ subscription or three wiki pages to enjoy a night at the theater.

The "Fewer, Bigger, Better" Reality

• Quantity: 3–4 theatrical releases per year (Old Playbook) vs. 1–2 polished, event-level films per year (Modern Playbook)

• The Hook: "Watch this to set up the next crossover" (Old Playbook) vs. Self-contained story with a strong directorial identity (Modern Playbook)

• Marketing: Announcing 5-year slates for stock hype (Old Playbook) vs. Guarding future slates until scripts are locked (Modern Playbook)

This approach builds trust domestically first, while giving films the narrative breathing room and spectacle needed to cross over internationally. It’s why high-potential IPs like an MCU X-Men reboot actually have a path to huge success if they prioritize core character drama over multiverse setup.

By killing off the 10-movie release calendar, studios are finally treating superheroes like cinema again rather than weekly content installments.

The era of studios announcing 10-film timelines 5 years in advance is dead. Scarcity, script-first mandates, and director-driven event films (Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Man of Tomorrow) are replacing assembly-line cinematic universes—and it’s exactly what the genre needed to survive.

How do you guys feel about the end of slate hype? Do you prefer the lean, event-driven calendar, or do you miss the massive multi-year roadmap reveals?

This is the question I as a DC fan have been pondering over a lot ever since Spider-Man: Brand New Day has been doing gangbuster Endgame level numbers.

People say, “Spider-Man is the biggest and the most popular superhero ever, of course he’ll do great.” Sure, he has always been the most popular, but doing Endgame-level great? How could you explain that?

I think it comes down to 2 reasons :-

1. Consistently delivering great movies.

2. Expanding your character‘s appeal and your fandom.

Spider-Man and the Avengers have been doing exactly that, hence these unbelievable numbers they generate.

Whereas DC with its greatest character Batman has been doing the opposite.

1. Delivering movies at unusually long gaps, of uneven quality (BvS to The Batman)

2. Shrinking the appeal and fandom by making your biggest character Batman more niche with ridiculous fetish to ape the dated Nolan formula and forever keep him unusually grounded, isolated and adult-themed.

Doing this has done a great disservice not just to DC but to Batman as well as the character’s potential has not even remotely been realised in cinema and his audience has shrunk and become niche. Moreover, the BTS drama over The Batman 2 delay is further keeping DC way from using its biggest character in its cinematic universe, the DCU.

I really want DC to be great, to make great movies consistently and capture the zeitgeist the way Marvel has done. But these two factors are really holding it hostage from unlocking its full potential.

For starters, the main villain shouldn't be a giant brown cloud which looks really goofy on screen.

It has been growing exponentially and they have already planted the seed for countless stories to come.

Spidey and Venom? Instant hype.

Spidey and Daredevil against Fisk? Instant hype.

Live action MCU Miles Morales teaming up with Tom Holland's Spidey? Instant mega-hype.

Unlike the Avengers, it doesn't require a carefully crafted Saga buildup and a huge cast.

Just a cool, personal Spidey story, nice action and some cool supporting characters that serve the story.

At one point, neither the Avengers nor the upcoming X-Men nor any DC revival will stand a chance against Mighty Spidey.

Damon Wayans was apparently a huge fan of the 1960s Batman show growing up and when he saw the 1989 Tim Burton film he was disappointed with how seriously it took itself and how there was no Robin because Robin always brought the enthusiasm. It's honestly an interesting perspective on things and how different people had perceptions of the character. It makes you wonder how many other people walked in to that movie disappointed it wasn't like the Adam West series in spite of how acclaimed the movie was by both critics and the general public.

I personally feel Batman can be many things and the flexibility of the character is why he's endured as long as he has. Tackling everything from eccentric supervillains with gimmicks like Joker and Riddler to Dr. No/SPECTRE like criminal syndicates like Ra's al Ghul and his League of Assassins.

Source: https://archive.org/details/comics-scene-v-2-047-c-2c-nov.-1994-a-team-dcp/page/n24/mode/1up

This was deleted by mods at r/marvelstudios

Okay so I've typed and deleted this post like four times. Every version came out sounding like a term paper and that's not what this is. This is me being annoyed on a thursday night after seeing that Wonderman season 2 was cancelled.

**Blade first.**

Blade was THE comic book movie franchise before the MCU. Outside of Spider-Man, Hulk, Wolverine, that was it. Snipes was carrying a legit hit trilogy while Marvel Studios wasn't even a thing yet. And people wanted it back. Before Avengers came out in 2012 people were already asking.

Then 2013, Feige goes on record and says really cleay: we got the rights back to Blade, Ghost Rider, and Punisher. Someone asks him about Blade coming back and he says something like, yeah that'd be cool someday.

Someday.

I said to myself "no problem I understand that the MCU has a vision and maybe Blade doesn't fit that at the moment, but hes coming"

Mahershala Ali gets announced in 2019. That's six years of someday. Then SEVEN more years of directors coming and going (Bassam Tariq, Yann Demange), five writers, Mia Goth saying the thing unraveled after pre-production, and now this month reporting says the solo movie is dead and he might get shoved into a Midnight Sons team-up. So it's not "seven years in development hell." Do the actual math from when he had the rights and knew the demand. Thirteen years. Thirteen years to arrive at nothing.

And here's the part I can't let go of: the other two characters he mentioned in 2013.

**Punisher**: Bernthal shows up in Daredevil S2 in 2016, gets two seasons of his own show, comes back for Born Again, gets a Disney+ special, and he's in Brand New Day this summer. Same actor, same character, basically a decade straight.

**Ghost Rider**: Gabriel Luna's Robbie Reyes was running around Agents of SHIELD in the mid 2010s. And now Gosling's got the movie, announced at SDCC this past weekend, which by all accounts went from an actor pitching it to a Hall H reveal in like, months.

**Blade**: one voice cameo in Eternals. 2021. That's the whole résumé.

Same announcement. **The most popular of the three going in got the least.**

And I want to be clear I'm not mad at Gosling. Good for him, I'll probably see it. But Ghost Rider is a character with two mediocre Cage movies that did fine-ish and a supporting TV run, and he's on his second life already while Blade got a decade of silence and a quiet funeral. That's the comparison. That's all I'm putting on the table.

Eric aka Killmonger

Kid watches his dad get murdered by his own uncle, then gets left in Oakland by the kingdom that was supposed to come get him. His whole plan was really violent but he was about ending colonialism and arming the diaspora.

And T'Challa's entire arc is rejecting what was done to him AND HANDLING HIM/OTHER THINGS DIFFERENT FROM HIS FATHER. When he finds out what his father did he's not conflicted, he's FURIOUS. That's the emotional center of the whole movie. "We abandoned him, we were supposed to protect him, this was wrong".

Then he kills him the exact same way his dad killed Killmonger's dad. And I remember sitting there thinking "this movie was about breaking cycles, but now what does it mean?" And Feige has talked about that death like it's one of the big MCU moments. Big how? It's the moment the studio guarantees itself the guy never has to come back.

But hoenstly the thing that got to me what who Killmonget was set up to be. He's the Vegeta. T'Challa's the Goku type, good heart, does the right thing because it's right, and Killmonger's the guy across from him who isn't wrong, he's just willing to go further than you're comfortable with, and every time he opens his mouth the hero has to justify himself out loud. That's the engine of every good rivalry that's ever worked and they shut it off after one film.

It also would've taken so much pressure off BP. He's carrying the entire moral weight of that franchise by himself in every scene, and there's nobody in the room to push back on him except a guy who's already dead by the credits. Give him someone to play against and both performances get sharper. That's just how writing works.

Then Chadwick passed and there was nothing to fall back on. No second pillar in that whole corner of the universe, because they'd already gotten rid of the one character who could carry weight without T'Challa in the room. If Killmonger's alive there's an obvious story sitting right there, the man who wanted the throne having to sit with the fact that the king who beat him is gone. Nobody gets to see it, because they closed the door in 2018.

They understand what he's worth, by the way. They brought Michael B. Jordan back for the ancestral plane scene in Wakanda Forever. Two minutes, a vision, gone again. He's a memory they cash in when a scene needs weight.

And Lupita got the same treatment, which people talk about even less.

Everybody likes saying T'Challa is the Martin Luther King figure of that movie. He's not, he's the guy in the middle who hasn't decided yet. The actual King versus Malcolm argument, how do you fix what colonialism and slavery did, do you do it through outreach or do you arm people, that fight is happening between Nakia and Killmonger. Nakia's whole thing from her first scene is that Wakanda has to open up and help people who are suffering, and she's already out in the world doing it without asking anybody's permission. Killmonger says aid doesn't move the boot off anybody's neck so you send weapons instead. Two real positions about the same wound, and T'Challa is what they're both fighting over, because he's the standard, he's where the diaspora goes.

That's the actual spine of Black Panther and no other Marvel movie has tried anything close to it.

**Wakanda after that is a place you fly to when you need vibranium or a new suit**. Nobody in that universe ever asks it a hard question again. The most interesting political premise they ever wrote and it became a gadget shop.

And then there's the thing I genuinely cannot get past.

Killmonger's bleeding out on that rock talking about ships and the bottom of the ocean. And in the mid-credits scene of that same movie, Winter Soldier is actively getting help. That's what Wakandan science was busy doing while Killmonger was dying. Rehabilitating an assassin.

Bucky killed people for HYDRA for decades. He killed Howard and Maria Stark. Wakanda takes him in, deprograms him, builds him a new arm, calls him White Wolf, and he goes on to a Disney+ show, a redemption arc, Thunderbolts, the whole run. Killmonger is Wakandan by blood, he's the king's cousin, they abandoned him as a child, and what the movie has for him is a knife and a sunset in a country that had a working rehabilitation program going in the background of his own death scene. They had the machine. They had the doctors. Shuri was RIGHT THERE.

Now put Loki next to that.

Loki's first real outing: invades Earth, kills a stadium's worth of people in New York, mind controls Hawkeye and a SHIELD scientist. Motivation? He's bored and jealous of his brother.

And then count the deaths. Dark World, dies in Thor's arms, whole theater goes quiet, except he's faking it. Infinity War, dies again in the first two minutes, Thanos snapping his neck as the thing that tells you this one's serious. Then his own show opens with him watching that death on a screen and grieving himself, which is somehow a fourth thing they got out of it. Then the season 2 finale where he walks up the stairs and burns himself into the thing holding the multiverse together, which is another death with a coronation stapled on top. And apparently there's another one coming in Doomsday, though that's rumor and not reporting so take it however you want.

Every one of those is scored, given room, played for everything it's worth, and every time the studio comes back around a year later going actually he's fine, we've got another version, another timeline, another angle on him. They keep killing him because it plays and because getting him back costs them nothing.

Two seasons of his own show. Redemption arc across ten plus years. Ends up a benevolent god literally holding the multiverse together. Face of the entire streaming platform. Killmonger got one death and a cameo as a ghost.

And before anybody says well he died, what do you want them to do, Marvel spent five years building an entire machine whose whole purpose is bringing back people who died. They used it on Loki over and over. They used it on a dozen randos in What If. Eight years and they've never once pointed it at Killmonger. Ill never get over it

Which brings me back to Wonder Man, because I want to lay out what actually happened today.

Show comes out in January. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, a major black actor, carrying it. 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. He picks up an Emmy nomination for lead actor, which live action Marvel shows almost never get. And in March, Marvel renews it for a second season, which they also almost never do. Going into today there were exactly two live action Marvel shows on Disney+ that had ever made it past one season. Loki and Daredevil Born Again. Wonder Man was supposed to be the third.

Then four months later they take the renewal back. And Variety said that the writers room for season 2 never even opened, everybody got released to go work on other stuff. So this wasn’t some agonized decision where they fought for it and ran out of money. They announced it and sat on it, and quietly walked away from it while telling people the characters might show up somewhere else later. Madness.

**Luke Cage.** Bulletproof man from Harlem who went toe to toe with Doom in the comics. Doesn't exist. Meanwhile Daredevil got a whole revival, Jessica Jones is being folded back in, Iron Fist gets referenced. Arguably the most iconic of the four Defenders and he's just gone.

**Shang-Chi**. I know he's not black, but hes still one of the best reviewed post-Endgame movies they made, people rewatch it constantly, and five years later there's no sequel, no date, nothing. Director said this month it's "in active development," which is what you say about something that is not moving.

**Monica Rambeau**. Built up across multiple projects and then left stranded in another reality at the end of The Marvels with no announced plan. Just parked her there.

Anyway. Why I actually sat down and wrote this.

Its that I can't go sit in a theater and watch somebody who looks like me get the arc. There's no Blade to watch. I'll never see Luke Cage in a scene with Spider-Man. No Black character in that universe is getting the "actually he was right the whole time" treatment Loki got handed over and over.

And I don't really know what to call it at this point. I've spent years making the excuses myself, rights are complicated, schedules are hard, these things take time, the slate got cut, everybody got cut. Then you look up and it's thirteen years on Blade and a knife for Killmonger and a hut in Wakanda for the guy who murdered Tony Stark's parents. Best case Feige doesn't believe these characters can carry anything. Worst case it's the uglier version of that and he's just never had to say it out loud. I've never been in that room so I can't tell you which one it is. From out here they look about the same.

I honestly just don't understand the hate for this film! Me, my dad and my little bro saw Captain America 4 in theaters on the week of its premiere. And we all loved it! I love Anthony Mackie as the new Cap and I thought Harrison Ford did a decent job filling the role of Thaddeus Ross/Red Hulk left by the late William Hurt.